Today, Dan and Jordan check in to see how Alex Jones is doing with the whole Trump/Iran situation. In this installment, Alex watched the Golden Globes which seems to have led him to concoct some bizarre theories about the fires in Australia. Also, Alex admits he tried to co-opt QAnon.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dan and Jordan. | |
| knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding me. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love you. | |
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Jordan. | |
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Have you ever physically escaped from somewhere? | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| I mean, I'm not, obviously, if you had been in prison before, you would have brought it up before now. | ||
| Would I have? | ||
| It's possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you don't talk about that sort of thing on a podcast. | |
| I will say I have not escaped from prison. | ||
| I've never been in an escape room. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Although I would do that. | ||
| I would too, but I don't want to. | ||
| It seems really out of character for me as someone who's kind of like... | ||
| Grumpy Gus? | ||
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| Looks down upon these pedestrian things. | ||
| I think I would do an escape room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I probably would. | ||
| Would you do one of those axe-throwing things? | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Have you never been to... | ||
| There are places where you can throw axes. | ||
| Like there's a big room where you can throw axes around? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sure. | ||
| You just go there and throw axes. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, let's do that sometime, too. | ||
| Let's make a list of all the... | ||
| That's the way to get out of an escape room. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| You throw axes. | ||
| Throw axes. | ||
| Eventually, every wall falls to an axe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's an old Norse saying. | |
| No, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, there have been times when I've been, like, exploring, like, creeks and caves and stuff like that in central Missouri when I was growing up. | ||
| And I have feelings of, like, vague memories of feeling like I was trapped somewhere. | ||
| But I probably wasn't. | ||
| It was probably just some, like, really childish panic mechanism or whatever. | ||
| Feeling like I was trapped. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| No quicksand in your history? | ||
| A lot of fears about quicksand. | ||
| A lot of fears about quicksand. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Somehow an entire generation got ruined by fear of quicksand and then we all found out that it's not even that big a deal. | ||
| I guess since you're now opening up to natural phenomenon... | ||
| There have been multiple times when I was even younger than when I was in Missouri. | ||
| I lived in Honolulu in Hawaii, and there were a number of times that I got caught in undertoes. | ||
| And that is one of the really scary things. | ||
| You're going around just trying to jump around in waves. | ||
| There's a giant wave, and you just get caught. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| Remembering that was like as a nine-year-old being like, oh no! | ||
| That's awful. | ||
| As evidenced by this podcast, I did escape all of those. | ||
| Yes, well. | ||
| But there were some close calls. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's just like feeling your body like... | ||
| Ripped around by the water. | ||
| You know to tread water, you know to swim, but you do those things and it doesn't seem to really help. | ||
| Horrifying. | ||
| Oh, that's terrible. | ||
| So I guess that's the best I got in terms of escapes. | ||
| I'm glad you escaped. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| But I do not know much about escaping from prison, but I do know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I don't know much about either. | ||
| This is the podcast. | ||
| Jordan, today we are back staying in the present day, and one of my reasons for that is, you know, there's been long periods of time on this podcast where we've just sort of abandoned the present and said, phooey, to it. | ||
| And I think that a lot of it is because I'd be listening to the episodes and just be Alex and Roger Stone talking shit about nothing, and I don't really care about that. | ||
| I think that there's a lot going on in the present day, and I think that as much as... | ||
| Some of it is awful. | ||
| Some of it's dumb. | ||
| I think it's probably in our best interest and the show's best interest to keep an eye on it and see what Alex's take is on certain things. | ||
| And I'm glad I did. | ||
| So today we're in January 6th, 2020. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| This is 2020. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You son of a bitch. | ||
| Alex, it does have that in a commercial now. | ||
| No! | ||
| So I don't know if it's... | ||
| Boo. | ||
| I don't know if he's going to say it on the show every day, but it's on a commercial that plays multiple times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| I'm Alex Jones. | ||
| This is 2020. | ||
| Which is cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So this is an interesting episode. | ||
| Alex, as we know from our last episode, talking about Friday of last week, the third, Alex had some interesting positions on the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. | ||
| Loves it. | ||
| Well, wants to not appear to love it, but seems to love it. | ||
| It's a bold move by the president. | ||
| It's a bold move. | ||
| Pretty huge. | ||
| Alex is not continuing that thread so much. | ||
| And I think, I have a working theory, and I think it's because he watched the Golden Globes. | ||
| I think that that is going to inform literally all of what ends up happening on this episode. | ||
| I think Alex watched the Golden Globes and he got really mad at Hollywood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay, so here's a frustrating thing. | ||
| That should be a joke. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That should be a joke. | ||
| And instead I listen to that and I'm like, that makes perfect sense. | ||
| Of course you watch the Golden Globes and now we're going to ignore Iran for a while. | ||
| You know how sometimes, I don't know actually, I don't know if you do this, but like sometimes I'll watch like a Dave Rubin, like a Rubin report just to be like, What's this asshole talking about? | ||
| I enter it knowing this isn't going to be pleasant for me. | ||
| Or I watch a Jesse Lee Peterson interview or something. | ||
| I'm just like, ah, this is going to make me kind of upset. | ||
| I think Alex might do that with the Golden Globes. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I think that's his version of it. | ||
| I suspect that he did that, and then now we get this. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I don't want to talk about Ricky Gervais. | ||
| We won't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yay! | |
| Fuck that guy. | ||
| Very briefly. | ||
| Ah, fuck that guy. | ||
| Alex thinks he did a great job. | ||
| Of course he does. | ||
| I can neither confirm or deny that because Richard Gervais may have done the best job ever. | ||
| I'll never know. | ||
| I will never know either. | ||
| I just don't want people talking about it. | ||
| Might have had a great set. | ||
| Can't say either way. | ||
| Not going to watch that. | ||
| Not going to look back. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So, anyway, there's a lot to get into. | ||
| We'll get it down to business. | ||
| But before we do, Jordan, we've got to take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| So, first of all, Maggie, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Maggie. | ||
| Next, a very special shout-out. | ||
| We're a day early on this, but as this episode is released. | ||
| But tomorrow, happy birthday, Casey. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Happy birthday, Casey! | ||
| Thank you so much, Casey. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Next, Noshi Senpai. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Noshi Senpai. | ||
| Next, Manta Ray. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Charlie. | ||
| Thank you, Charlie. | ||
| Next, Brett. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Brett. | ||
| Got to take a breath before this one. | ||
| Is it Sugar Ray? | ||
| Uh, what? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Oh, because Mantra Ray? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I thought you meant Mark McGrath, which we would accept sponsorship from Mark McGrath. | ||
| The hell we would! | ||
| I just want to fly. | ||
| Next, Johan, Gamble, Putty, Devon, Osfern, Shendendon, Schledder, Kress, Kren, Bon, Fry. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thank you so much, Johan, Gamble, Putty, Devon, Osfern, Schledder, Kress, and Bon, Fry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And finally, Cody. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Cody. | ||
| If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoy the show, I'd like to support what these gents 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'd be very helpful. | ||
| So, Jordan, the show opens with Alex announcing that the world metaphorically, metaphysically, spiritually, and literally is on fire. | ||
| We are already six days in. | ||
| The 2020. | ||
| And the world. | ||
| is on fire. | ||
| Culturally, economically, spiritually, and yes, physically. | ||
| I'm going to open the phones up now. | ||
| Next segment, as soon as the calls come in. | ||
| From listeners and viewers in the great continent... | ||
| And the great nation down under Australia. | ||
| You could even have a headline for this live show, InfoWars Live in Australia. | ||
| You couldn't. | ||
| That would be a lie. | ||
| You're not in Australia. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| So this is one of the reasons why I think Alex is really responding aggressively to the Golden Globes, because the situation with the fires in Australia has been going on for a while, and I haven't heard Alex bring it up at all. | ||
| Now, at the Golden Globes, a number of people gave speeches like Cate Blanchett, Joaquin Phoenix. | ||
| Alex had some comments about supporting the efforts to fight the fires in Australia, and I think this is a backlash to that. | ||
| I think Alex saw Hollywood talking about this, and he's like, well, I gotta cover it. | ||
| I am a reactive force in the world. | ||
| What is he going to do? | ||
| Try and get people to set a new fire in Australia? | ||
| How can he be worse about it? | ||
| Steve Pachenik started all of the fires. | ||
| Steve's going to come on and say they don't even exist. | ||
| The fire isn't even real. | ||
| His initial take on this is that it's no big deal. | ||
| What? | ||
| This happens. | ||
| And I think that he's being a little bit glib and stupid. | ||
| We'll get into that, but the thing that's important is that Alex has a different position on this at the end of the show than he does at the beginning of the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| His position at the beginning is there are just fires in Australia. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| This is how farmers, they burn their fields in order to get potash. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Hot take. | ||
| Or cold take. | ||
| This is sort of the beginning of it. | ||
| And of course it's all just like... | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| This is a normal situation. | ||
| But the media wants to tell you that it's climate change so they can get carbon taxes to pay to the Rothschilds. | ||
| So we're going to start here with that. | ||
| This is Alex's take at the beginning, which is dismissive. | ||
| It's very much dismissive. | ||
| What's happening in Australia? | ||
| Obviously, the millions of acres burned. | ||
| Obviously, many deaths. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of property lost. | ||
| But the big story is... | ||
| But concerted corporate media worldwide is saying it's global warming or climate change, and that if we paid carbon taxes to the UN and to the IMF and World Bank and literally to Lord Rothschild and to Al Gore and Obama and Bill Clinton, who own climate exchanges in London, England and Chicago, Illinois, that they will save us. | ||
| While just by Australia is China, with no environmental controls, who lobbies for our industry to be shut down. | ||
| Carbon dioxide coming out of coal plants has nothing, nothing to do with the fact that Australia has always had giant fires. | ||
| I can sense your anger bubbling up. | ||
| No, no, no, this is fine. | ||
| There's no big deal here. | ||
| There's no problems. | ||
| Before we get into any of this, I think that having any kind of take on this that is the leading... | ||
| Part of your perspective? | ||
| Like, hey, they're lying about climate change and all that, I think is really bad, primarily because your focus should be on the people that are affected by this. | ||
| Your primary focus should be on the people who are suffering, these people who have died, people who have lost their homes. | ||
| That is the immediate crisis. | ||
| I know that there's a lot of people who listen to our show who live in Australia, and obviously our hearts go out to you, and I hope you're impacted as little as possible. | ||
| I don't even know how to articulate this. | ||
| I hope you're okay. | ||
| Yeah, but I just think that he's unfocusing from the people affected and turning it into a larger conspiracy or dismissing it out of hand is a great disservice. | ||
| You can't open with, okay, sure. | ||
| There are a lot of acres that are burned. | ||
| Sure, people have died and property is damaged. | ||
| Yada, yada, yada. | ||
| This is about Obama and taxes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Even if it was about Obama and taxes, there's still people burning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Alex is not totally incorrect in his statement that fires have always been a part of Australia. | ||
| The continent has a long history of bushfires, which have on occasion gotten out of control and caused some severe damage. | ||
| Black Saturday in February 2009 is considered the worst fire in recorded Australian history, killing 175 people and destroying more than 2,000 homes. | ||
| At this point, the current fires in Australia have killed 27 people, but some estimates of it already destroying more property than the worst bushfire on the books. | ||
| Already, millions of acres of land is burned, and the impact on things like the environment and animal populations, that isn't something we can even really quantify at this point. | ||
| Put simply, even though Australia has a history of fires, that is absolutely no excuse not to take what's unfolding right now deathly serious. | ||
| First things first. | ||
| No one is saying that climate change is causing the fires. | ||
| That is a straw man. | ||
| The argument that experts are putting forth is that the effects of climate change are intensifying these fires. | ||
| Phys.org spoke with Stanford University Environmental Studies Director Chris Field, who explained the connection between climate change and these fires. | ||
| Coincidentally, he also described the fires as, quote, one of the worst, if not the worst, climate change extreme events he's ever seen. | ||
| What's happened is that Australia has seen decreased rainfall in recent years, while the summer has brought record-setting high temperatures. | ||
| These drought conditions create drier fuel for fires, which can be started by accident or by a lightning strike, at which point the fires that are started are far more intense and spread much easier than they would have under different conditions. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which is nonsense. | ||
| Alex always makes climate change into a conspiracy about people like Obama and Al Gore trying to make money off carbon taxes. | ||
| But now that I actually think about it, I'm not sure I've ever heard him actually lay out what their profit strategy would be. | ||
| I realize that I've always just heard him say that and like, huh. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| They're exchanging climate bucks for coal belts, and that's how they make money, Dan. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| I know he says that they own carbon exchanges, which isn't true. | ||
| But even if they did, I'm not positive how that would make them rich if there were carbon taxes implemented. | ||
| Because in that framework, the money collected would go to the government. | ||
| I think that Alex is mixing up two different potential plans that have been floated about reducing carbon emissions. | ||
| Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. | ||
| Carbon taxes would just be taxes that polluting businesses would have to pay to the government based on their level of carbon emission. | ||
| The working theory for this is that there's a burden that the larger population takes on that's caused by the pollution, so the taxes would be the polluter's way of paying to help mitigate the damage done to everyone. | ||
| There are people with different views on how that tax money would be spent. | ||
| Some people think it should go to subsidized alternative energy sources. | ||
| Some think it should be paid to the citizens in the form of a carbon dividend. | ||
| Others advocate it being used for more general infrastructure improvements to make society more able to deal with the consequences that may come. | ||
| But the basic idea is that pollution hurts all of us, so the polluters should have to pay to help the larger society deal with those consequences. | ||
| The Independent recently reported on a new study conducted by, quote, a coalition of 15 health and environmental organizations. | ||
| And this report found that your risk of lung cancer rises approximately 10% if you live within 50 meters of a major road. | ||
| And that there were additional risks to childhood lung development from the air pollution of living near high levels of traffic. | ||
| This is why emissions-restricting regulations are important for the automobile industry, which incidentally is something that Trump has been signaling that he wants to relax considerably. | ||
| These are the sorts of things where there is a damage to society, therefore we need to do these things in order to help. | ||
| Mitigate that damage. | ||
| Or, how about this? | ||
| All those people can die and they'll get all the profits because fuck them! | ||
| Hooray! | ||
| Right, so that's the working theory behind the carbon taxes idea. | ||
| Conversely, cap and trade involves the government setting a cap on emissions, which each company could theoretically hit. | ||
| But let's say you're running a factory and you make improvements that'll assure that you don't end up hitting that cap. | ||
| In that situation, you could sell those permitted emissions to another factory that's going to end up exceeding the cap. | ||
| This system would set an overall ceiling for emissions and make it so that limit is not exceeded. | ||
| Currently nine states in the United States and many countries around the world have cap-and-trade systems in place. | ||
| Now, granted, there are other cap-and-trade models that don't have an overall ceiling. | ||
| That ceiling is sort of variable, but the premise is largely that you would have a ceiling, and then of those available allowances, people could trade them. | ||
| Right, and if you want any idea of which one would be better for the environment, currently most of these companies are lobbying more for a cap-and-trade since they assume something is coming. | ||
| So they're putting their money behind cap and trade over carbon tax, and I think we all know why. | ||
| I think a lot of the people who... | ||
| They will both do good, though. | ||
| Don't get me wrong there. | ||
| I think a lot of the people who make the most sense that I've heard from seem to indicate a mixture of both as probably the best path forward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| No, absolutely. | ||
| These are two different plans. | ||
| In the tax model, the amount of carbon emissions would fluctuate whereas the price of emissions would be static. | ||
| Conversely, in the cap and trade model, the market would determine the price businesses would pay to buy or sell carbon allowances whereas the amount of emissions would be static. | ||
| These are intrinsically different, but not mutually exclusive, and like I said, a lot of experts advocate using both systems in some form. | ||
| I'm all about throwing the kitchen sink at it at this point. | ||
| Cap-and-trade is the system wherein Alex's theory of carbon exchanges would be more relevant, since I presume that when he's talking about Obama and Al Gore owning these carbon equivalents of stock markets, that's where they would make a cut off the trading of carbon credits. | ||
| But Alex never talks about cap-and-trade. | ||
| He always talks about carbon taxes, which I find weird, since under the plan involving just carbon taxes, that wouldn't necessarily involve exchanges where people are trading emissions as a commodity. | ||
| Whenever Alex talks about Al Gore and all of these people owning climate exchanges, he always talks about the Chicago Climate Exchange, like he did in that last clip. | ||
| This is probably because Al Gore had invested in that exchange through his Generation Investment Fund, Management Fund. | ||
| However... | ||
| What Alex fails to mention, ever, is that the Chicago Climate Exchange stopped trading in carbon credits in November 2010. | ||
| It's almost been a decade since the Chicago Exchange has had anything to do with anything close to what Alex is talking about. | ||
| He has an old piece of information, namely that Al Gore had invested in an exchange that was engaging in carbon credit trading, and he has no idea that he's just regurgitating conspiracies that are long past their expiration date. | ||
| Honestly, this kind of thing is embarrassing. | ||
| How it's just muscle memory for him. | ||
| He doesn't know anything. | ||
| He just has phrases he can whip out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, Al Gore owns the Climate Chicago Exchange. | |
| It's been ten years. | ||
| Have you considered that they might be laundering climate money? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So what they do is... | ||
| And they're still secretly doing this. | ||
| They just name it something different. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| I'm running out. | ||
| I got nothing. | ||
| That's fucking stupid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a decade! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is a climate exchange that's based in London, and it's called the European Climate Exchange, and it was bought by a large commodity trading business called Intercontinental Exchange, also back in 2010. | ||
| I know that none of the people that Alex listed own Intercontinental Exchange, but if any of them invested in it, who cares? | ||
| That doesn't prove anything. | ||
| Yeah, Jay-Z actually owns that one. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| It's a gigantic company. | ||
| This is a tired conspiracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what, Beyonce then? | |
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| This is a tired conspiracy with no legs to it. | ||
| Based on the way Alex talks, I'm not convinced that he knows the difference between carbon tax plans and cap and trade. | ||
| I'm further not convinced that he's aware that the Chicago Climate Exchange stopped trading carbon credits almost 10 years ago. | ||
| I strongly suspect that he has no idea what he's talking about, but he has a lot of climate denial catchphrases that he can repeat, but they ultimately mean nothing. | ||
| Larger picture, like I said, Alex's first response to the fires in Australia is not concern for the people affected, not a call for help. | ||
| Not feelings of condolences. | ||
| It's to launch into how the media is saying that this is climate change related, which is just a plan to get Al Gore rich. | ||
| He's a bad person. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's basically saying that they're false flagging the fires in order to, or they're not false flagging, but what's it? | ||
| It's just lying. | ||
| He's saying that they're lying about it in order to make it look like it's climate change, when in reality, it's normal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So his angle on it is that it's just a normal thing. | ||
| This is just what happens with controlled burns that farmers do. | ||
| Just like in California. | ||
| You know, sometimes in order to grow redwoods, everything's got to burn on the floor and stuff like that. | ||
| And that's why it's totally fine that we've had so much of California on fire for the past few years. | ||
| So Alex is trying to make this argument that it's normal. | ||
| And in service of that, he reads a Wall Street Journal article that I don't think he read before the show because it kind of tends to contradict. | ||
| So it's not normal. | ||
| So it's not normal. | ||
| Killing at least 20 people, shrouding cities in choking haze, and... | ||
| Stretching firefighters at the breaking point. | ||
| So that's bad. | ||
| And so they've entered the dry season. | ||
| They've entered the season when people do the controlled burns to put nitrogen and other minerals and things back into the soil to grow again. | ||
| So there you can see sort of the theme of his main argument at the beginning of the show. | ||
| It's just normal. | ||
| People doing controlled burns to make sure plentiful harvest comes. | ||
| But unfortunately, he decided to read that Wall Street Journal article without pre-screening, and he accidentally contradicted his entire narrative by pointing out that the fire is two months early this year. | ||
| Generally, if things are just going normally, and the fires are the result of controlled burns that get out of control, then you would expect gigantic fires two months earlier than normal? | ||
| That's why we have words like early, because that's just early normal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's just normal, but a little bit sooner. | ||
| So if you're paying attention to Alex and know that words mean things, Alex is a problem. | ||
| And that is that he now has to explain why farmers are doing these controlled burns two months earlier than they have every year up till this point. | ||
| He knows he can't do that, so he just moves forward pretending that he didn't just read that line. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| It's a big issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The important point here is that Alex has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. | |
| He just feels like this is the result of farmers burning their fields to improve the soil for he's basing that on literally nothing. | ||
| It's just his opinion, which is not shared by any source I can find that discusses the fire. | ||
| Add to that the fact that he seems completely unaware that these fires are out of season from normal fire patterns, and you have every reason to think that this is just a dude talking He's just talking shit. | ||
| He's reacting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's reacting in that pre-programmed way that so many climate denialists exist now because at this point we're in... | ||
| Well, I'm Jordan and this is 2020. | ||
| And we are in a situation where you can't avoid it. | ||
| It is... | ||
| All of the denialism that you did... | ||
| You made this worse, and now you can't do anything but look into the burning fire that is the fucking world without admitting it. | ||
| And you don't want to do that, because then you have to admit that you played a part in this. | ||
| You played a part in the reason this falling apart, so you keep denying. | ||
| The best strategy is just kind of knee-jerk denial and hand-waving. | ||
| It seems like that is what Alex intended to do when he started the episode. | ||
| And I keep implying that it's going to change, because it is. | ||
| Well, he probably read the Wall Street Journal thinking, oh, this will back me up. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| Why do you do that? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| You've got to read these articles before you talk about them, Alex. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| You start reading them on air. | ||
| You should start reading, period. | ||
| That would be nice. | ||
| So the thing is that climate change is the greatest weapon against society, right? | ||
| I thought it was the greatest threat to society, but I suppose that could be weaponized. | ||
| If these climate change people get their way, they will be able to destroy us. | ||
| And quite frankly, if Hitler had environmental regulations... | ||
| I should have seen Hitler coming! | ||
| Hitler could never get bombers over to the United States to bomb our factories and coal plants that gave us all that cheap electricity. | ||
| But if he could have lobbied environmentalists before to tell us we were all guilty and bad and convinced us to not have any plants, well, he could have dominated. | ||
| It's just like China has many more times coal-powered plants than we have. | ||
| They build new ones every week. | ||
| We shut down half our plants under Obama. | ||
| We have thousands of years of clean coal. | ||
| All the stacks is carbon dioxide and water. | ||
| So for a long time, I've heard Alex say that all coal in the United States is clean coal, which obviously isn't true, but I've just kind of assumed he was just lying. | ||
| Now I'm becoming convinced he just doesn't know what he's talking about. | ||
| At the end of that clip, he says that we have all this clean coal and all that comes out of these power plants is CO2 and water, but that isn't what clean coal is. | ||
| Clean coal technologies usually refer to technologies that don't allow CO2 emissions. | ||
| For instance, there's carbon capture technologies that aim to capture all the CO2 emissions from burning coal, but then that still needs to be stored somewhere where it won't enter the atmosphere, which is tough and is usually underground. | ||
| Plus, retrofitting existing coal power plants to make this technology is insanely expensive. | ||
| And if Alex's primary concern is that carbon taxes would make operating power plants too expensive, then this is not the plan he should be enthusiastic about. | ||
| Free market, Dan. | ||
| Can't have the government in there. | ||
| I don't think he understands this stuff at all. | ||
| No clue. | ||
| Because the way he's phrasing this, all that comes out is CO2 and water, it's like, well, that's... | ||
| That's the problem, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, you have accidentally gotten this exactly right. | ||
| There is an issue here. | ||
| Well, but he's saying that that is what clean coal is, and he doesn't understand that this is the... | ||
| He doesn't understand the premises. | ||
| He doesn't understand the concepts he's discussing. | ||
| And, I mean, to be fair, there are some promising ideas about carbon capture, but honestly, based on the way Alex is talking, I don't think he has an idea of what those things are. | ||
| He's just saying that we have this clean coal stuff going on, and all the plants emit our CO2 and water. | ||
| That's not the point. | ||
| I'm saying, like, honestly, the more he's talking, especially on this episode, I think more so than normally, I don't think he knows what he's talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I don't think the words that he's saying make sense. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's incoherent. | ||
| Here's where he gets into trouble, is that he accidentally reveals what everybody knows, which is that clean coal isn't really a fucking thing. | ||
| It's just not a thing. | ||
| Well, it's a broad term for a number of things, and some of them show some good promise. | ||
| But what Alex is talking about seems to be like a concept that you take a little toothbrush to some coal, clean it off. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the way that it's been used as a propaganda tool in order to avoid changing anything. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, I know you think coal is bad. | ||
| And thank God we're not using that anymore. | ||
| We're using clean coal, which is the same thing. | ||
| This coal took a bath. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's what they're trying to convince people of. | ||
| Not of any actual technological advancement. | ||
| There are some processes that can make things a little better. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That do involve, like, I know it's not taking a toothbrush to coal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But in terms of, like, cleaning some coal, you can make things a little better, but not nearly enough. | ||
| No. | ||
| And somehow the worst way to solve this problem is actually to burn the coal plants down. | ||
| You would think that that would work. | ||
| It's a cruel irony. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| I just don't think... | ||
| I think Alex is severely out of his depth. | ||
| And the talking points that he's using and the way he's presenting things mismatches even itself so much that I just... | ||
| I hear this and I'm just like, this is sad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But actually, we have a moment here where we've got to give credit where credit's due. | ||
| Alex jumps to talking about the evolving situation with Trump and Iran and Iraq. | ||
| That sort of triangular situation. | ||
| And I actually think that Alex has a pretty good thought. | ||
| And I hate to say it. | ||
| Do we have... | ||
| Streamers? | ||
| Do we have some sort of celebratory? | ||
| Do we have fireworks? | ||
| I will never celebrate. | ||
| Are balloons going to drop from the ceiling? | ||
| I will never celebrate Alex having a decent position because I know that it'll probably be invalidated at some point. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Tomorrow it's going to be worse. | ||
| And it's so elementary. | ||
| I'm not going to applaud him for reading a sentence, basically, is what I'm saying. | ||
| But credit where credit's due. | ||
| The fact that Trump has come out and said that he's threatening sanctions. | ||
| On Iraq and saying we will not leave until they pay billions of dollars. | ||
| The United States invaded Iraq. | ||
| The United States overthrew their leader. | ||
| And I understand Trump saying we shouldn't have had to pay for all that. | ||
| And why did China get all the oil and the rest of it? | ||
| But this is bad. | ||
| And so when I see Trump do something or float an idea that I think is terrible, I'm going to tell you. | ||
| I'm persecuted for supporting Trump. | ||
| I'm a tap. | ||
| They're trying to shut us down because he's a nationalist. | ||
| He's pro-gun. | ||
| He's calling the shots, not the globalist. | ||
| And so they want to destroy Infowars because they see it as a focal point of Trump's base. | ||
| So fuck the end of that. | ||
| But at the beginning, I think he's on the right track. | ||
| He's on the right side of the idea that Trump would want to extort Iraq before removing troops. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that is bad. | ||
| The reason I don't want to give him too much props is because I feel like this is a pretty obvious one. | ||
| But I do think that as we are such a negative show about Alex, I think it's pretty important to point out the very rare occasions when he has a decent thought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because I do think that treating him as a guy who's always wrong about everything, while fairly accurate, isn't really fair. | ||
| And it turns him into a monster as opposed to a human who's a... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| I don't have much interest in... | ||
| Like, doing a podcast about a caricature of somebody. | ||
| You are right that it is a very simple and elemental thought that we shouldn't be running an international protection ring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That does seem like, it does seem like that's a very simple, we shouldn't just be going around country to country being like, hey, it'd be terrible if your government was overthrown. | ||
| I'm just saying, you know, pay us a little bit, we'll get our troops out of there, no big deal. | ||
| Yeah, it seems... | ||
| Cartoonish. | ||
| It seems cartoonishly evil. | ||
| So what's happened here is that in the aftermath of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iraqi parliament passed a non-binding resolution to expel our troops from the country. | ||
| They were seeking to cancel Iraq's request for U.S. assistance against ISIS, which would invalidate our reason to continue to be there in the country. | ||
| This is one of those consequences to the Soleimani assassination that doesn't seem like... | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| We're America. | ||
| We don't face consequences, Dan. | ||
| It makes it seem like no one really had a plan for this, which isn't good. | ||
| No one has any fucking clue what's going on. | ||
| It's kind of amazing. | ||
| So the parliament is just requesting that the government of Iraq do this, which would make one think that it's not going to go anywhere, except for the fact that the resolution was passed after Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi asked parliament to act to expel foreign troops. | ||
| In response, What does that even fucking mean? | ||
| It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame. | ||
| He also said, quote, we have very extraordinarily expensive airbase that's there. | ||
| It costs billions of dollars to build. | ||
| We're not leaving unless they pay us back for it. | ||
| Trump is being a huge asshole and acting in ways that are very unhelpful, so it's good to see that Alex can see that. | ||
| The thing is, though, this isn't really different than how Trump always acts, so it's unclear why this time Alex is hedging a little bit. | ||
| I would bet it has something to do with realizing that supporting this kind of shit would probably alienate whatever base Alex has left. | ||
| Those calls he took on Friday were not a good sampling of his audience's temperature. | ||
| And if he realizes, like, okay, this is going to possibly extend, the way Trump is acting tends towards trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if I support that, I will lose any of the Ron Paul anti-interventionist... | ||
| Types that are my bedrock. | ||
| They were the people who theoretically have been around the longest. | ||
| There's a line that Alex can't cross, and that's probably starting a war. | ||
| It's really frustrating to me that that line is the difference of... | ||
| I'm fine with him terrorizing black and brown people here, but not in other countries. | ||
| That's a really fucked up line they live on. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| It just goes to show people are different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People have different thoughts. | |
| That is not a priority for him. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| It's a tough realization. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess they do love war. | ||
| They just don't like the fact that there's an end that isn't like we unequivocally won. | ||
| Like, the people who want these kinds of wars, or even who don't want it, who have this anti-interventionist thing, it's not because of the war part. | ||
| It's because it's going to cost money and last 20 years, like what we're dealing with now. | ||
| Yeah, perhaps. | ||
| What they would prefer is just like, we win, so now Iraq is 51st state. | ||
| You know, like, it's over. | ||
| Sure, like Alex's buddy was franchising America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, hey, all right. | ||
| It's a bad idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex gets back to the climate issues, and we're going to get more of the Australia nonsense here in a little bit. | ||
| But he's mostly complaining about China. | ||
| And in this clip, he's complaining because, and like I said, I really think that a lot of this has to do with watching the Golden Globes, because his way in for a lot of this stuff is complaining about Cate Blanchett and others and their speeches. | ||
| So he's complaining about how Blanchett said, When one country faces a climate crisis, we all are facing that. | ||
| And his rebuttal to that is, what about how China puts a lot of trash into the ocean? | ||
| That is a very grown-up and adult way of dealing with that criticism. | ||
| And I have a little thought on the other side of this clip. | ||
| Script readers, these teleprompter readers that everybody worships. | ||
| Boo! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Because when one country faces a climate disaster, we all face a climate disaster. | ||
| Real quick, I don't think you can insult a professional actress as being a script reader. | ||
| That seems... | ||
| Especially considering you've read a script, you idiot. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when China, who's responsible for over half the trash in the world they admit dumped in the ocean... | ||
| Buy those big super ships, garbage ships, haulers. | ||
| When they go out to the 12-mile line and dump it off your coast, that does affect the whole world. | ||
| But you never hear a word from these environmental groups about telling China not to do that. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| Yes, all the time! | ||
| That's what we say all the time. | ||
| All the time! | ||
| So, I don't know if his statistics are right, because I didn't... | ||
| I'm not sure if they are. | ||
| I know that pollution is a problem and all that, but you do hear environmental groups talking about that quite regularly. | ||
| And also, largely, the problem with Alex's point here is that his worldview doesn't have a solution to it, but globalization does. | ||
| He's recognizing the interconnectedness of actions that are taken by other countries and how they affect you. | ||
| Okay, so you're saying that that sovereign nation, which I love that they're a sovereign nation, By virtue of what they're doing is hurting me personally. | ||
| So how do I tell them what to do? | ||
| Well, see, the problem is that you can't do anything inside Alex's framework that's completely nationalist about China polluting. | ||
| There's nothing you can do other than, I guess, start a war with them. | ||
| You can impose sanctions, but I don't know if that's going to work. | ||
| You've cut off trade with them. | ||
| But Alex isn't dumb enough to think that that's a viable path. | ||
| In a globalized framework, there would be international mechanisms in place where the responsibilities that different countries have to each other could be handled. | ||
| Things that Alex is passionately against, like the Paris Accords, or even, to some extent, the TPP. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Those would be moves towards that sort of thing being possible. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Within, you know, more, like, obviously not talking about a one-world government necessarily, but... | ||
| International bodies can do that. | ||
| Countries independently acting cannot, really. | ||
| No, the only way that one country would be able to do something like that is if it were the entire world, Dan. | ||
| What if we have one... | ||
| Let's not do... | ||
| Let's do one nation. | ||
| It's just the entire world. | ||
| We're all nationalists now. | ||
| See? | ||
| Populism. | ||
| I fixed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll see. | |
| Done. | ||
| The issue, too, is like, okay, Alex could say, well, we, as the United States, could put pressure on China in order to make them stop doing that. | ||
| That's not going to work. | ||
| So what Alex would then say is like, well, a group of nations, sovereign nations, could get together to put pressure on it. | ||
| And you see how that already is stepping down the line towards, eventually, what is the ideal solution? | ||
| One world government. | ||
| That group of nations, sovereign individual nations working together. | ||
| It is good, but what would be better is if China was also one of those nations. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| You're slowly making more and more sense, and I'm not liking it. | ||
| But that's what Alex should recognize as well. | ||
| Because it's very obviously pointing him, like it's in his face, to where he can't even ignore it. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's why some of his ideas are very dumb. | ||
| It used to work. | ||
| But now the world is, when the world was big, nations seemed like you could exist solo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now the world is very, very small. | ||
| There's far too much interconnectedness for us all to ever really, and we know a lot more than we used to. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| About the ways that, let's say, air pollution in the, like, let's say, most northern parts of America can affect Canada. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's the arbitrary lines of borders don't. | ||
| Stop real things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you can draw it on a map. | |
| Natural forces are not beholden to borders. | ||
| And that's just a reality that we need to deal with if we want to move forward. | ||
| Which we're not dealing with. | ||
| Alex certainly isn't. | ||
| No. | ||
| So his complaint is larger about China. | ||
| And one of the things that he brings up here is that, like, so if you have a motorcycle that is really bad and polluting, then yeah, that's bad, but we have catalytic converters, and now motorcycles have to have those. | ||
| That is a good regulation. | ||
| So first we learn that there are some good regulations, according to Alex, which... | ||
| Means that he now has a responsibility to differentiate between what is a good regulation and what's a bad one, and what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. | ||
| Sure seems like it. | ||
| And I've seen no evidence that he has put the work into doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't think so? | |
| No, I have not. | ||
| And then he just straight up lies about China. | ||
| They lecture everyone about don't fly on airplanes and don't have a car. | ||
| In fact, don't even have a motorcycle that's bad for the earth. | ||
| So again, he's complaining about Golden Globe speeches. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Well, yeah, having a dirty tailpipe, not having a catalytic converter is bad for everybody and stinks and you have to breathe toxic fumes. | ||
| Catalytic converters, clean that up. | ||
| That's a good invention. | ||
| That's a good regulation. | ||
| Hey, these cities are toxic. | ||
| There's brown smoke in the sky. | ||
| Clean it up with engineering. | ||
| But China says we don't want to do that because that'll make us not competitive. | ||
| So China's just now getting around to saying catalytic converters. | ||
| No controls on their smokestacks. | ||
| Their rivers catch on fire. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So I sincerely think Alex is completely relying on entirely out-of-date information to make this narrative up. | ||
| I say that because what he's saying about China is completely inaccurate to the point where it kind of feels like he's just making it up. | ||
| I will say that he's not making up the thing about a river catching on fire in China, but that also happened in 2014. | ||
| Incidentally, that same year, a dude in North Dakota caused a bit of a stir by posting a video to YouTube where he set the water coming out of his faucet on fire. | ||
| So I guess it's not just a China thing. | ||
| And it was only 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland set on fire here in the United States, and that's not so long ago in the big picture of things. | ||
| Oh, and also that same year, 1969, the Rouge River in Detroit set on fire. | ||
| And in 1968, the Buffalo River set on fire. | ||
| This would still be happening regularly in the United States if it weren't for the Environmental Protection Agency, which Alex is not a fan of, weirdly. | ||
| David Sandalow of the Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy released a 169-page guide to the Chinese climate policy just recently. | ||
| It was reflecting the state of affairs in 2019, as well as initiatives the Chinese government has undertaken to counter climate change. | ||
| Suffice it to say, they just got catalytic converters is not the conclusion this paper arrives at. | ||
| One thing that's important to remember is that China is a massive country and one that has been experiencing a boom in the past decade or so. | ||
| When you talk about one aspect of their energy policy, it's crucial to consider other aspects as well so you can get a full picture. | ||
| For instance, China has added a lot of coal-fired power capacity in the past years, but at the same time, they also added, quote, 43% of the world's new renewable power capacity in 2018. | ||
| China is also a country that has 45% of the electric vehicles in the world, and 99% of the electric buses in the world. | ||
| Another aspect of this that has to be taken into account is China's gigantic population. | ||
| In 2018, they were the largest emitter of heat-trapping gases, but if you look at the numbers on a per capita level, they were only emitting 6.6 metric tons per person, as opposed to 15.7 metric tons per American. | ||
| What I'm saying is that there's a complex picture to China in climate issues that's not easily captured by single stats or vague notions like Alex tries to put forth. | ||
| It's probably true that China had previously taken a really dismissive posture towards climate issues, but they've been a bit more responsive in recent years. | ||
| They've announced a plan to achieve peak CO2 emissions by 2030 with goals to hit that peak sooner, a goal that most analysts think is very achievable. | ||
| They've committed to... | ||
| Creating 4.5 billion cubic acres of reforestation by 2030, and they actually accomplish that goal 11 years ahead of schedule. | ||
| There are domestic programs in place working in the right direction. | ||
| In their five-year plan covering 2016 to 2020, they put in place regulations that require, quote, all new coal plants must use supercritical or ultra-supercritical technology, and that older technologies were to be retired. | ||
| By 2017, 90 of their 100 largest coal-burning power plants were ultra-supercritical. | ||
| They launched carbon trading programs in eight cities and provinces with plans to implement it nationally in the near future. | ||
| That is quite literally China placing a price on emitting carbon, which Alex is claiming they refuse to do because they don't want to be competitive. | ||
| Or they don't want to be uncompetitive. | ||
| Additionally, they put in place new building standards to make residential and public buildings more energy efficient. | ||
| And, quote, as of September 2016, roughly 4,500 buildings in China had received green building labels. | ||
| I could go on and on about this stuff, but I think the point is pretty clear. | ||
| It's just not fair to say that China is not doing anything about climate issues. | ||
| The primary conclusion of this report is literally, quote, the Chinese government is taking significant steps to address climate change. | ||
| There are negatives in the mix, too, like their use of synthetic natural gases, which is not good, but the general trend seems to be in a positive direction. | ||
| China knows that they are a country that's particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, from their long history of severe droughts to the more recent phenomenon of horrible air pollution. | ||
| Nothing that Alex is saying at all depicts reality, but I think it might depict reality... | ||
| A little bit closer to the truth, the last time he actually cared about doing his job, which would have been in the early to mid-2000s. | ||
| Maybe even longer. | ||
| I think this is all just remnants of a time when he actually cared to look into things, and he just remembers this stuff and hasn't ever checked to update it. | ||
| Same thing with Al Gore in the Chicago Climate Exchange. | ||
| He's just never checked in to see, like, is this still true? | ||
| I know I was yelling about it in 2007. | ||
| It does seem like maybe one of the side effects of taking too many of his supplements is the inability to turn short-term memories into long-term memories. | ||
| You know? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| All long-term memories are paramount. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What I mean is he can't replace new long-term memories. | ||
| His short-term memory disappears. | ||
| I disagree, because I don't think he has a short-term memory of these narratives no longer being true. | ||
| He just doesn't care. | ||
| He's checked the box about China doesn't care about climate change, and Al Gore runs this exchange. | ||
| And he doesn't even care to check... | ||
| So there is no short-term memory. | ||
| There's no updating. | ||
| There's no looking into it. | ||
| There's no updating at all. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| And to be totally fair, none of this is to say that the Chinese government is doing everything right. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| There are absolutely issues. | ||
| If you're coming here for us to say the Chinese government is doing everything right, I think you're in trouble. | ||
| Even in the climate space. | ||
| But the issue that I take is that what Alex is saying is not true. | ||
| There is a complicated and larger picture to Chinese climate policy that Alex refuses to engage with because I think it would show that maybe they are at least indicating stronger things than Trump is. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And they tend to invalidate his entire narrative about China just wanting to shut down our industries and refusing to do these things domestically and internally because it would make them uncompetitive. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| Yeah, there is something of a benefit to having a nationalized energy policy that can be enacted with... | ||
| I mean, not like unilaterally, but... | ||
| Very aggressively, and the party's pressure can make it happen a lot quicker than if there's... | ||
| We need to have a year of debate on this, and we need to get lobbyists in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's not to say that that makes that system preferable. | |
| It is one of the things that that system is capable of doing that ours is simply not. | ||
| Your comment is descriptive less than prescriptive. | ||
| And one of the things that I think was really interesting about reading that climate report from the Columbia Energy Policy Center was... | ||
| Something that they highlighted a bit is how one of the things that China does that's really effective is that they set variable goals for the various provinces and cities depending on what is achievable within those. | ||
| So they make this forward progress within the sectors of the country that progress is appropriate and doable. | ||
| And apparently, it seems like that is a very effective... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's similar to... | ||
| I don't know if you've ever had to sell cars, but one of the things that they do with a bunch of salesmen is if you're a really good salesman, they'll be like, your goal for this month is sell 12 cars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you're a bad one, they're like, your goal is to sell four cars just because... | ||
| That way you're setting achievable goals for yourself, which makes you more motivated to do so. | ||
| It's one of the principles of productivity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And if everybody's trying to get 12, I don't know, there's some sort of Bible verse about it. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| You have to set actionable items that are achievable. | ||
| Because if not, you're probably going to dismiss them as like, oh, that's pie in the sky shit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I just think that, you know, Alex is... | ||
| In the same way that I think it's important to give props to Alex when he says something like, Trump is trying to extort Iraq and this is really bad. | ||
| I think that that's important because it deals with Alex as he is, as opposed to a cartoonish sketch. | ||
| When you see him saying that China just got catalytic converters, that's him treating his enemy as a cartoonish sketch. | ||
| And you see how ineffective and stupid that is. | ||
| Anyway, that's my point. | ||
| He's very dumb. | ||
| He just hates China. | ||
| He's turned them into... | ||
| The new Big Bad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or the old Big Bad. | ||
| As we started the show, Alex was saying that he's live in Australia. | ||
| Yeah, sure, why not? | ||
| And one of the things he wants to do is take calls from Australia. | ||
| Does he know there's a time difference? | ||
| He does. | ||
| And he brings up repeatedly that back when he used to be doing the night shift, doing later radio, he'd always get calls from Australia. | ||
| Sure he would. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure he would. | ||
| I leave that aside. | ||
| So many calls from Australia. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Is he paying attention to the ATP Cup? | ||
| Nick Kyrgios has got some tasty aces. | ||
| Does not come up. | ||
| No, does it? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So he decides he's going to take some calls. | ||
| He ends up getting two calls from Australia, and they're both... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So here he's... | ||
| Here's where the narrative starts to pivot. | ||
| I'm going to go to your phone calls right now from Australia. | ||
| Appreciate people calling in with these record fires, which have been man-made. | ||
| Arsonists are just setting them. | ||
| Same thing's happening in... | ||
| Where? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| California and other areas. | ||
| Most of those fires, it's turned out, the government has confirmed, they've arrested people that are doing it. | ||
| Schizophrenics, crazy people, people wanting to burn down their house to get insurance money. | ||
| So now, Alex's angle on this is that the fires in Australia are arson. | ||
| I can't stress this enough. | ||
| Up to this point in the show, he was saying it's a completely natural thing where farmers do controlled burns, but now it's arson. | ||
| This indicates to me that Alex had no idea what he was talking about when he started the show, so he was planning to just hand-wave this away as no big deal. | ||
| But when he saw a headline that indicated maybe there was some arson, he decided, haha, I can work with this. | ||
| That's my way. | ||
| There are some people who have been arrested for setting fires, but it's absolutely not the main driver of what's going on in Australia. | ||
| A large part of the push for the narrative that this is all arson surrounds an online conspiracy theory that climate extremists are setting the fire as a false flag in order to convince people that climate change is real, which I expect will be Alex's position eventually once someone tells him about it. | ||
| Man, if Stone were still around, we'd be on that right now. | ||
| False flag it. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't think Stone would care. | ||
| He's got other issues. | ||
| Even if he wasn't going to prison, he'd have other issues. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I think that Alex has seen some sort of a headline, and now he decides to make a break in his coverage and go this way. | ||
| And so now it's a conspiracy, and he starts rambling about stuff that just makes no sense. | ||
| The last 30 years, they won't let him cut underbrush or fire breaks in California. | ||
| That's a state rule. | ||
| They won't let him do any of that stuff. | ||
| They won't let him take out mountain lions, so the mountain lions are starting to eat people. | ||
| This is the rewilding project, so how bad is it going to get? | ||
| So, do you know anything about mountain lions eating people? | ||
| Um, no. | ||
| It's a serious problem. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| I should tell you, it's been 16 years since anyone has been killed by a mountain lion in California. | ||
| In fact, only two people have been killed by mountain lions in the United States in the last 12 years. | ||
| A 55-year-old woman in a national forest in Oregon, and a 32-year-old woman in the foothills of North Bend, Washington. | ||
| So what you're saying is that mountain lions are hunting women in the Pacific Northwest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess, Alex, there would be more truth to that than Alex's narrative. | |
| That because you can't kill mountain lions, now they're eating people all over the place. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Alex seems to have this weird obsession with the idea that animals are eating people in California. | ||
| He's brought it up about, like, what was the other animal? | ||
| I think it was coyote. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I guess he just knows that California is a completely foreign land to all of his listeners, so it doesn't matter how real anything he says about the state is. | ||
| Look out! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't go to California and get eaten by a mountain lion. | |
| Man, I did not realize that predatory cats were a huge issue for the United States right now. | ||
| Very serious. | ||
| Very serious problems. | ||
| Should I be worried? | ||
| Forget about Iran. | ||
| We're in Chicago. | ||
| Should I be worried? | ||
| Forget about Iran. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Cats. | ||
| And not the movie. | ||
| No, and that movie was Predictive Program. | ||
| That is true! | ||
| They're trying to normalize. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| They're trying to normalize cats talking to you, so, hey, you're out one day, mountain lion, you go, hey, how's it going, Rum Tum Tugger? | ||
| Next thing you know, you're eaten. | ||
| That'll happen. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That'll happen. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Judi Dench killed at least four people in making that movie. | ||
| Undoubtedly. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| So, there are a lot of reasons why fire breaks are not particularly common in California, but it's not so much that the state won't let you do them, it's because they wouldn't help. | ||
| California's geography is pretty mountainous, so finding the right places to make the breaks would be pretty difficult. | ||
| But more importantly, one of the primary characteristics of California fires is that they are wind-driven. | ||
| The wind spreads the fire to such a great extent that creating fire breaks wouldn't really have the desired effect of stopping a fire's progression. | ||
| The fire would really just jump over the break. | ||
| The campfire is actually a prime example of this. | ||
| They had breaks in place, but it didn't matter. | ||
| The fire crossed the breaks super easily. | ||
| Paradise, California did exactly what Alex is suggesting. | ||
| They spent millions of dollars to remove underbrush and make fire breaks 100 feet wide. | ||
| Embers from the fire were easily carried across that gap, and the town was basically destroyed. | ||
| Every one of the ten most destructive California fires have been driven by the wind, which is not something that Alex's solution helps with at all. | ||
| So once again, we find Alex talking complete shit and having no idea of the topic that he pretends to be an expert in. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| But we'll make fire breaks that go up into the sky. | ||
| They'll be very tall. | ||
| We'll make them out of wood. | ||
| It'll be easy. | ||
| Wood is great against fires. | ||
| So, there is no state rule that bans firebreaks. | ||
| In fact, Cal Fire director Tom Porter told the LA Times recently, quote, we continue to do them. | ||
| They help us get people out of the way. | ||
| They serve some purpose to slow down a fire, but it's not really a full preventative strategy when wind is a factor. | ||
| Alex is just making shit up about firebreaks and mountain lions to the point where I don't even know why he does this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I don't know what the point is. | ||
| He's not helping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's all made up. | |
| Denying climate change is like... | ||
| Yeah, I really needed that mountain lion bit there. | ||
| No, you could have just ignored that. | ||
| I think he just thinks it makes it more interesting. | ||
| Does he talk about mountain lions? | ||
| Yeah, I get the sense that he just thinks like, ah, it doesn't make me sound... | ||
| He tosses a little inflammatory, like, oh, we're 10 days, we're going to be cannibals, there's mountain lions over there, and everybody's watching out for birds. | ||
| I think a large piece of it, too, is the othering of California, making it seem like some kind of a... | ||
| A wild land of... | ||
| You know, you've got the governor out there, that democratic globalist. | ||
| He doesn't care about people. | ||
| He wants these fires to happen, and they're putting things in place to make mountain lions eat you. | ||
| It's just that sort of nonsensical, cartoonish version of his enemies. | ||
| It comes back to that a lot of the time. | ||
| So anyway, Alex did watch the Golden Globes. | ||
| Of course he did. | ||
| He has some thoughts. | ||
| I think this is the only time Gervais is going to come up, but Alex's take on this is really funny. | ||
| Amazing things happened at the Golden Globes with the main comedian coming out and exposing Hollywood as a bunch of pedophiles. | ||
| That would have been really big news. | ||
| I feel like that would have been really big news. | ||
| He made an Epstein joke. | ||
| Of course he did. | ||
| That's what Alex is responding to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| Also, I can't wait for Alex to find out what Ricky Gervais thinks about this God guy. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| It's all it takes. | ||
| Epstein joke, and you're good to go. | ||
| In my good books. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| What a phenomenal job. | ||
| Something amazing happened at the Golden Globes tonight. | ||
| One of the most vocally annoying atheists in the world made a tepid joke about Epstein. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| According to things Alex has said previously, like the figureheads and the big figures in the atheist community are all vampires. | ||
| Yes, he is. | ||
| He must be a vampire. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Oh man, Alex, make some fucking sense for one second. | ||
| Nah, this is Ricky Gervais guy. | ||
| He's not really an atheist. | ||
| Just some consistency, some continuity from idea to idea. | ||
| I need something. | ||
| It's not important. | ||
| So Alex goes to this first caller from Australia and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I've just turned 41 and I'm living in Hobart, Tasmania now, but I lived on the mainland. | |
| Basically, all my life. | ||
| And there's always been fires, as you say, but I've never seen anything like this before. | ||
| And I think the fact that they're being deliberately lit is something that Australians have never seen either. | ||
| Like we, you know, randomly people will hear about people lighting fires, but nothing like this. | ||
| And I have been reading some articles that the Eastern Shelf that... | ||
| Coming from Brisbane down to Melbourne that they are actually planning on a high-speed rail, train rail line down there and Agenda 2030, sorry, Agenda 2030 cities along there. | ||
| So I have read a couple of theories that are both here and in California. | ||
| Those things have been planned for us. | ||
| So this is a popular conspiracy theory that's flying around online with literally... | ||
| Agenda 2030? | ||
| That's the updating of Agenda 21. Great, great. | ||
| So there's nothing to back this up other than that Australia has talked about building high-speed rail lines. | ||
| It's just really some weak shit. | ||
| Alex gets a caller from Australia, and the main thing she brings to the table is that she read something on a dumb blog. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is not good. | ||
| She is bringing the heat today. | ||
| This isn't good. | ||
| Pardon the... | ||
| So Alex talks to her a little bit, and it's mostly more of this. | ||
| And I felt really bad about how this call ends, and I don't want to mock this person too much because she gets pretty emotional. | ||
| But I think if you take the content of what she's saying, this is not somebody that you should take as a good source of information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've lived in Brisbane most of my life, and I've gotten out of there because basically, like, all on the buses and different things like that. | |
| They've called it Australia's New World City. | ||
| That's what they have named it, Brisbane, Australia's New World City. | ||
| And I'm like, you can't make a statement like that and it doesn't mean, it doesn't not mean something. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So that's been sort of a decade that they've been, they've labelled Brisbane as Australia's New World City. | ||
| And I'm like thinking, well, what, what does that mean? | ||
| And then all these sort of pieces of the puzzle are coming together that if this is true... | ||
| This is the cheaper option of destroying all of that bushland leading from Melbourne to Brisbane to clear the way through these rails and these cities. | ||
| If that comes to pass, it's just heartbreaking. | ||
| Two days a year I'd spend all day crying. | ||
| Well, thank you for calling, and we hear the emotion in your voice, Rachel. | ||
| Please call back again. | ||
| God bless you, and thanks for staying up for listening to the show. | ||
| Caroline, you're up next. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| And what she said is what people are already saying. | ||
| So, she starts crying there at the end of the call. | ||
| What she's putting forth is that basically these fires are being set on purpose in order for the New World Order to create a high-speed rail line throughout the country. | ||
| And it's all based on maybe a promotional campaign. | ||
| The New World City. | ||
| You can't say something like that without it meaning something. | ||
| And it's like, we have thousands of years of human history of people saying exactly that. | ||
| The New World? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could say that it's a New World Order thing, or you could also take the words a little differently. | ||
| Like, you consider things like London, New York. | ||
| Those are world cities. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Those are cities that are part of their metropolitan. | ||
| They're part of the world community as opposed to, you know, the lesser extent that a small town might be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Hong Kong is a world city. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could say that this is a new world city. | ||
| You could look at it that way as the promotional campaign being about we're going to build up Brisbane to the point where it is relevant on the global scale. | ||
| You could see it that way. | ||
| Instead she takes it as a cue that nah this is the globalists coming in and taking over Brisbane. | ||
| And it's just like I just feel very sad for her because it clearly affects her this emotionally. | ||
| But I do feel like The conjecture of all this is arson and it's all a conspiracy in order to build this rail line. | ||
| But Alex is going out to break and as soon as he comes back from break, those details are now his narrative. | ||
| Evidence is mounting that the megafires in Australia are being orchestrated. | ||
| By multinational forces to clear out key corridors for future development and for light rail going in that's being financed by the communist Chinese. | ||
| So he has nothing to back that. | ||
| He just has this caller who has called in with some speculation that she's giving him second hand from weird conspiracy blogs. | ||
| And I found a post on Reddit that probably was part of this. | ||
| Like, he's just, this is not good. | ||
| I mean, at the beginning of the show, he was saying, no big deal, natural thing. | ||
| Now the Chinese are... | ||
| Evidence is mounting. | ||
| The Chinese and international groups are setting these fires on purpose. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want to make fun of her. | |
| She's dealing with a massive tragedy. | ||
| And unfortunately, in that reaction to it, she's just been like... | ||
| Push towards this awful information. | ||
| And so, how to balance an actual tragedy with what your imaginary reason for it, and then to call Alex is so... | ||
| It's compounding the tragedy. | ||
| Because all you're really doing is ensuring that nothing will be done to help or solve it. | ||
| Or prevent it from happening in the future. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| But Alex isn't making this stuff up. | ||
| Evidence is mounting. | ||
| That's the fastest I think I've ever seen that Fox News, you know, Tucker Carlson says something stupid and then the next morning, some people are saying that this evidence is mounting. | ||
| It took two seconds. | ||
| Right, but there's other evidence. | ||
| Is there? | ||
| I've got to be clear with all the viewers out there. | ||
| It's not like I'm just saying this is my opinion. | ||
| There's a big story up on DrudgeReport.com from Summit.News. | ||
| Nearly 200 people arrested across Australia for deliberately starting the brush fires. | ||
| It's a big article. | ||
| It's got the police. | ||
| It's got the links. | ||
| It's got the newscast. | ||
| Sting. | ||
| All reporting on the fact that it's almost all deliberate arson. | ||
| Not just people burning what's left of their crops to put nitrogen and minerals back into the soil. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's being done to watch it unfold. | ||
| That was... | ||
| What hour are we in? | ||
| Like a second? | ||
| That's a contradiction of how you started the show, so that's great. | ||
| Don't deal with that at all. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But look, the article that Alex is talking about on Drudge is on Summit.News. | ||
| It was written by Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| So this is kind of the same thing as Alex just reporting on his own coverage. | ||
| Which would normally be like, alright, let's dismiss this out of hand. | ||
| But I wanted to check in on the article to get a sense of the information PJ Dubs is bringing to the table. | ||
| Firstly... | ||
| The headline of that article, or the article that's up on Summit.News, is, quote, Australian police say arsonists and lightning to blame for bushfires, not climate change. | ||
| Then, the sub-headline is, quote, sit down, global warming alarmists. | ||
| This is a little weird. | ||
| First of all, because of the tone. | ||
| Is this supposed to be reporting, or is it a dishy blog where Paul slams people? | ||
| Because it definitely sounds like the latter. | ||
| Well, they shut down Deadspin, so he's trying to step into that space, I guess. | ||
| The other issue is that even if some of the fires might have been set by arson, and others were started by lightning, that in no way invalidates the argument that climate proponents are making. | ||
| That only refutes the strawman argument that Alex and Paul Joseph Watson are using to attack climate change advocates, claiming that people are saying that climate change literally started the fires. | ||
| It's really easy to win an argument when you just pretend your opponent is saying something they're not. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How exactly would climate change start a fire? | ||
| Matches. | ||
| Do they think that climate change, like, if the Earth gets hotter, then some things are just so hot they burst into flames? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is that what they are trying to say? | ||
| I don't know, because they're not clear about what they think people are saying. | ||
| It does seem like they're being purposefully vague about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm going to look at this article, and I don't believe that it proves the point that it's making, but I want to clarify before I get into this. | ||
| Even if every single fire was started by arson, that doesn't refute the climate change argument. | ||
| It really doesn't. | ||
| So this is not really even engaging with that level of things. | ||
| This is just trying to see what Paul is up to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So in the article, Paul writes, quote, Police are now working on the premise arson is to blame for much of the devastation caused this bushfire season. | ||
| Report 7 News, Sydney. | ||
| This is a reference to a tweet that 7 News posted on January 3rd, along with a video news report. | ||
| The news report includes footage from a police representative, but he doesn't say anything about the scale of arson. | ||
| In fact, in the video, the reporter who's doing the piece, he talks about suspicions of arson in one case, and he talks about how it turns out it was actually lightning that set that fire. | ||
| The only proof here is something that's in the tweet itself, in the body of the tweet, and I can't really find substantiation of that quote or anything past that. | ||
| So, I decided to check out 7 News' Twitter account, and there's plenty of coverage of the fires and videos posted to press conferences being held by police and fire officials, and wouldn't you know it, none of them are about how this is mostly arson. | ||
| There are a couple tweets about a couple fires being considered suspicious, but nothing on the scale of what Alex is putting forth. | ||
| There's also a whole lot of coverage about how two people were struck by lightning on the same day, though. | ||
| Weird, considering lightning is another way these fires get started. | ||
| That is... | ||
| The most arson you can have, right? | ||
| If you get struck by lightning and get lit on fire and then trip and start a massive bushfire, that's still technically arson. | ||
| There's a lot of coverage of this two people being struck by lightning on the same day, which I understand. | ||
| It is pretty wild. | ||
| The odds are slim. | ||
| That guy looking at a double rainbow got a whole day of news coverage. | ||
| Now, again, I want to be clear. | ||
| Paul's anti-climate change argument is not made by showing that some fires were started by arson. | ||
| That doesn't matter to the larger point at all, because the real point people are making is just that climate change effects are making these sorts of events more severe. | ||
| That being said, I looked through his article to see if he was making a good argument against even the straw man, and he's not. | ||
| No. | ||
| Alex is citing this number of almost 200 people who were arrested for arson, but that's not even in this article that Paul wrote. | ||
| So maybe he wrote another one? | ||
| Or maybe he just made up 200 people. | ||
| No, I guess he could have written a second article on the topic. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But I decided to try and track that down. | ||
| This comes from right-wing blogs like Zero Hedge and Post Millennial, who are covering an article in The Australian, which purports that since the beginning of November, 183 people, quote, have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offenses. | ||
| However, the article also says that only 24 have actually been arrested for deliberately setting fires. | ||
| The rest of them were probably given a ticket for flicking a cigarette butt in a high fire hazard area, which of course is not good, but not the same as arson. | ||
| An article in MSN seems to indicate that 47 of these people were... | ||
| Exactly that situation. | ||
| Discarding a cigarette or match inappropriately. | ||
| And 53 of them were people cited for not following the complete fire ban. | ||
| So they might have been making a campfire or grilling or something like that. | ||
| These numbers Alex is using are completely misleading. | ||
| They're meant to make it seem like there are tons and tons of arsonists out there and that's all that's going on. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| This post-millennial article on the subject concludes, quote, That's 183 people who have been arrested for arson, resulting in catastrophic bushfires, displacement, property loss, and deaths of both people and animals. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| That seems like a bit of a leap. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| It's at very least a dreadful oversimplification. | ||
| Some of these people who are arrested and starting fires, they might be completely unrelated to the bushfires. | ||
| For instance, Two separate arsons took place on January 4th and 5th in Elizabeth North, one on each side of a duplex. | ||
| These were just completely old-fashioned arson. | ||
| One on each side of a duplex? | ||
| One day it was one side, the next day it was the other. | ||
| Okay, so was it two angry neighbors? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They did arrest a guy who was holed up on a roof, though, in that neighborhood. | ||
| And they have a pretty good sense that it was him. | ||
| But that has nothing to do with the larger fires. | ||
| That's just someone setting a building on fire. | ||
| At least one of these people who was arrested was a 36-year-old man who set a fire in Johnsonville, which was contained. | ||
| So that's not really related to the larger situation. | ||
| Two teens were arrested for arson on January 5th because they were trying to break into a shed that they were trying to rob, which has nothing to do with the bushfires. | ||
| There was another case in Melbourne of a guy who was arrested for arson, but that was part of a theft. | ||
| He was trying to maybe cause a distraction in order to, you know, and that has nothing to do with this. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds fun. | ||
| One of them was a 54-year-old man who was using power tools in Marsden Park, which caused sparks that set a fire. | ||
| Paul would know that if he consulted his primary source, 7 News, who covered the topic. | ||
| 7 News also reported on a 79-year-old man who was arrested for setting fires who is believed to have dementia. | ||
| The point here is we don't know the circumstances of the 24 people who were arrested for deliberately setting fires, and this goes back to November, so it's been months. | ||
| They're not necessarily related to the situation as a whole, and it would be irresponsible to jump to too many conclusions. | ||
| It would not just be irresponsible. | ||
| It would be a tantamount to a massive scapegoating campaign that could seriously get somebody killed. | ||
| It's more than... | ||
| Look, if we're talking about the Boston bombing situation where they just put a random person's picture up and they're like, this is probably the person who did it. | ||
| Imagine if it was your entire fucking continent was on fire. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there are probably, I mean, from the indications that I see, there are probably at least some people who are deliberately setting fires and are pretty fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And, you know, they call them firebugs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there are, it does seem like there are some people who are just oriented that way. | ||
| Some people like setting fires. | ||
| True. | ||
| And also, some of the people might be trying to create independent backburns where they think that what they're doing is helpful. | ||
| Like, that's a possibility? | ||
| I don't know if that's the case. | ||
| I might be making that up. | ||
| But right now, Alex doesn't know either. | ||
| He has no information to go on. | ||
| But he's relying on misrepresented headlines to craft a narrative about this tragedy that is, all these people are just arsonists. | ||
| And you're totally right, too. | ||
| There's a really good point. | ||
| And that is that scapegoating element. | ||
| Because there are people who are getting arrested for this. | ||
| And from the articles that I've seen, wisely, I believe. | ||
| A lot of the identities are not released. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank God. | |
| Because you could imagine how that could get so incredibly out of control. | ||
| This guy who set a fire for whatever reason he did in Johnsonville that got contained has nothing to do with... | ||
| Can you imagine if his identity gets out and people just kill him? | ||
| I saw he was an arsonist and now it's... | ||
| No, it could be incredibly fucked up. | ||
| Look, I just lost $1.2 million of property to yesterday. | ||
| So guess what? | ||
| This guy's got arson and now it's fucked. | ||
| And the other issue, why it would be dangerous, like scapegoating stuff, is that according to the BBC, there are between 52,000 and 54,000 bushfires in Australia every year. | ||
| 13% of those are deliberately set. | ||
| And half of those that are deliberately set are set by people who are under 21. Which makes some sense. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| The youth are generally more attracted to playing with fire. | ||
| And if some of the instances of the people who are arrested for fire-related offenses are, like, 15, you could cause tremendous consequences in their life for something that, I mean, you obviously got to teach them not to do that. | ||
| You don't want to create a Frankenstein's monster situation where the town is coming. | ||
| A lady tweeted a bad joke about Africa and lost her entire life. | ||
| Imagine if somebody just decided that you caused a bushfire that destroyed... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So, to sum this up and to conclude, there do seem to be some instances of arson. | ||
| The extent to which that is relevant to the actual gigantic fires that are going on is unclear at this point, and to report it as such is irresponsible. | ||
| Now, larger picture, whether or not a fire was started by arson is irrelevant to the issues the climate change advocates are bringing up, but I decided to engage with this a little bit since it seems like something Alex is obsessed with. | ||
| It appears that, you know, like I said, there are some fires that were intentionally set, but Alex is filling the gaps here with his fantasies. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's real bad. | ||
| That's so annoying. | ||
| That's so annoying, that whole, like, oh, you guys think it's climate change that's doing this. | ||
| And it's just like if, let's say if Alex was a witch, right? | ||
| And we had to burn him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't want to, but the Lord says that he would agree with me. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| That would be terrible. | ||
| But imagine if that witch burning was also surrounded by everybody that you've ever loved who was lit on fire as well. | ||
| And then surrounding that was every building and they were all covered in gasoline. | ||
| That's the climate change part. | ||
| It doesn't matter if you light them on fire. | ||
| So, leaving that aside. | ||
| He's a witch. | ||
| The interesting thing is that they don't crystallize what the argument they're refuting is that climate change people are putting forth. | ||
| And so this argument that, hey, there's people setting fires, it doesn't do anything to the climate change argument. | ||
| But it does contradict Alex's prior argument. | ||
| The only thing that's being refuted is things that Alex has already said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So that's cool. | ||
| It's good to know that he can really synthesize new information and add it. | ||
| He does a good job. | ||
| Yeah, that's great. | ||
| And now he complains more about the Golden Globes. | ||
| Caroline, then I'll get to those clips I mentioned. | ||
| And Joaquin Phoenix, who I find insufferably obnoxious with his fake autistic act he does everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He gets up there and talks about, don't eat meat, it's bad for the environment, that crap. | ||
| But at least says, let's stop flying on private jets all the time and being hypocrites. | ||
| Yeah, if you really believe that's bad, then... | ||
| Meanwhile, the real private jets in the jet fuel have the barium salt, aluminum dioxide, and industrial level added as part of this international secret agreement. | ||
| And it's actually messing with the atmosphere, but oh! | ||
| It's like California dumps the most deadly fluoride in the water with hundreds of other chemicals in it. | ||
| They have a waiver. | ||
| Under Prop 65, but then if you sell a product with one billionth of what's in the water, they'll sue you out of existence. | ||
| Just don't watch the Golden Globes, man. | ||
| They're not for you. | ||
| I know they're not for me. | ||
| I don't watch them. | ||
| So as for Prop 65, Alex is just making up the thing where California has a waiver to put fluoride in the water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| They got a waiver. | ||
| He's just mad because Prop 65 requires that people provide warnings for the presence of certain chemicals and toxins in the products they sell. | ||
| No! | ||
| They wouldn't need a waiver for fluoride because it's not on the list of ingredients that require a warning, even if that was relevant. | ||
| Alex is making that up. | ||
| The issue here is that California has far more rigorous standards for supplements than a lot of the rest of the country, and it also has by far the largest population. | ||
| If Alex doesn't meet their standards with his products, he misses out on approximately 39 million potential customers, but it also costs him a bunch more to produce his dumb pills. | ||
| If it weren't for California Prop 65, his profit margins would be a lot higher because he could just make trash and sell it. | ||
| That's all he's complaining about here. | ||
| That's what he's upset about. | ||
| That's very annoying. | ||
| I have to have so much less lead in my products because of California's Prop 65 and it makes me really pissed off. | ||
| Look, as insufferable as I find actors and celebrities to be for the most part, I wish more conservatives knew that the main reason they are... | ||
| Their fervor to hate California is drummed up is because rich people don't make as much money. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It is a big part of it. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So now we learn more about Australia in this next clip. | ||
| And we see that the crystallization of this narrative has happened. | ||
| Alex is now reporting. | ||
| 100% reporting. | ||
| And he said it wasn't his opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Australia, the Chi-Com government, and China's right there, basically runs the place. | ||
| Really? | ||
| China runs Australia. | ||
| But Australia was going to be invaded by Japan in World War II. | ||
| I mean, they're right over there in the middle of this. | ||
| And China says they look at Australia as a place to invade. | ||
| So, these fires are very strategic. | ||
| They are arson. | ||
| So I'm sure he watched the Golden Globes last night and somebody just showed him a regular globe and he was like, holy shit, Australia is really close to China. | ||
| Also, I'm sure Queen Elizabeth is going to be upset to hear the news that China runs Australia. | ||
| That is unfortunate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That clip is important because Alex is asserting that these fires are arson and were done strategically as a fact. | ||
| This is not a person putting forth an opinion. | ||
| He's reporting this and he has no reason to do that. | ||
| An hour earlier, he was saying this was just natural. | ||
| It's just what happens when farmers set fires on their fields. | ||
| But no, the globalists want to tell you that it's climate change. | ||
| In the span of less than an hour on air, he's completely changed his tune. | ||
| And now he's pretending that he didn't start the show saying it was no big deal. | ||
| Now this is a gigantic deal. | ||
| It's the biggest deal. | ||
| But the Chinese government is paying arsonists to set fires to clear the area in order to prepare for high-speed rail lines and Agenda 2030, whatever. | ||
| This is how easy it is for Alex to convince himself of something. | ||
| The thing that I want to highlight is that this is not a product of his stupidity. | ||
| This is striking while the iron is hot. | ||
| This is craft. | ||
| Alex sees an opportunity here. | ||
| There's a massively traumatic world event that will be getting a lot of attention in the coming days, and he's seen it get a lot of play in the Golden Globes, so it's a perfect place for him to plant his flag. | ||
| That's what connects his initial position with his new one. | ||
| They're both contrarian to the rest of the world. | ||
| Like the rest of the world has a position and he's pushing back against it. | ||
| They're meant to be optically subversive and present some kind of elevated understanding of what's going on in the rest of the world that no one else has access to. | ||
| When the show began, Alex didn't have a good angle on the conspiracy for this because he's not that creative. | ||
| He steals pretty much every idea he's ever had, from his 9-11 prediction to the Hillary for prison bumper stickers to the catchphrase about the answer to 1984 being 1776. | ||
| He steals everything. | ||
| Alex cannot create. | ||
| He can only absorb. | ||
| So the best he could do at the beginning of the show was to be a contrarian who says that you don't understand how controlled burns work. | ||
| You're getting all hysterical about climate change, whereas Alex understands everything. | ||
| He's zen. | ||
| He knows that this will just lead to better crops. | ||
| Then he gets a call from a nutty Australian lady, and she reads blogs he doesn't even have time to read anymore. | ||
| So she repeats the popular conspiracy lying to him, and he recognizes that's probably got more juice in it than this condescending, controlled, burnt bullshit. | ||
| That's some good stuff. | ||
| So he jumps on it. | ||
| This is how it sounds to me. | ||
| I might be wrong, but what I know for sure is that Alex isn't basing this narrative on anything real. | ||
| He's making a strategic decision based on what he thinks will make him more interesting and probably lead to a better financial outcome for him. | ||
| More attention, more... | ||
| You know, anytime there's hot-button issues, staking some sort of a claim that is counter to what everyone else believes is a way to try and filter people. | ||
| Like, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| Let's see what this guy has to say. | ||
| That's all this is. | ||
| And you see how it builds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His ability to go from listening to her thinking, man, I wish I had thought of that, to an hour later being like, man, I'm so glad I thought of that. | ||
| It's so annoying. | ||
| I'm so glad that I am so well trained and knowing what the globalists are up to that I was able to deduce this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I thought of it by myself, alone. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So Alex is now securely in that position, that this is the narrative, and he moves forward with it. | ||
| These are the biggest fires in Australian history. | ||
| The globalists are saying we need carbon taxes to fix all this, but the police say all the fires are arson, and they busted a bunch of people in the acts of doing it, waiting until the driest time of the year, setting the fires, burning up all these corridors, right where the Chinese are putting in light rail. | ||
| So now you can see how the narrative is evolving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Whereas at the beginning of the show, again, he's saying it's no big deal. | ||
| Now he's pitching it as the biggest fire ever. | ||
| And that changes because now he has an angle on it to pin it on the globalists. | ||
| It's no big deal to him if the fires are big until he has an angle. | ||
| Now that he's found a way to blame his enemies, it's crucial that the event be as big as possible. | ||
| And you can't do bigger than biggest ever. | ||
| Now he's saying that the police say that all the fires are arson, which is not true, and that they busted people in the act, which is at least not accurate in the way Alex is saying it. | ||
| He has his motive, thanks to that caller, that the Chinese light rail thing is going on. | ||
| And now Alex is set. | ||
| He's got a conspiracy that he gets to yell about. | ||
| It doesn't happen too often, but this is a really clear-cut case of Alex improvising a conspiracy. | ||
| This feels really similar to the Boston bombing stuff, where you can almost see the gears moving in his head, and it's honestly sick. | ||
| It's sick shit. | ||
| It is unfair how asymmetrical the info war is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, we have all the info, and he's like, aha, I counter you with none, and somehow I'm still winning. | ||
| It's fucking unfair. | ||
| And then you get him under oath and he says it's just my feelings. | ||
| Oh, it's just an opinion. | ||
| It's just my feelings. | ||
| I feel good. | ||
| I just talk about what I think. | ||
| I just talk about what I feel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So Alex has got another caller from Australia who is certain that this is an Agenda 2030 globalist plot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And we don't need to listen to a ton of that because it's just sort of a meandering conspiracy, basically. | ||
| But I want to play this clip because I think this is... | ||
| People say stuff like this, and you're just like, you shouldn't be listening to people who also believe these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really dodgy things going on. | |
| Like, I mean, there's a photograph taken of a fire the other day, and there's a freaking laser beam coming from the sky into it. | ||
| I've actually pulled it in, and I've had a look at it, and it looks like it was taken on a mobile phone, and it doesn't look like the photograph's been tampered with. | ||
| Wow, send that photograph to showtips at infowars.com, Caroline, and thank you so much. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when you have somebody who's talking about this Chinese globalist conspiracy for light rail and all this stuff, and then they tell you, you know what, I saw a picture of this, and it looks like these were set by laser beams. | ||
| You kind of have to be like, okay, I should take both of those things as being equally, they're coming from the same place. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I gotta say, if you're gonna go around with the laser beam stuff, I'm gonna treat your thoughts about the light rail and that grand conspiracy with the exact same disdain and dismissiveness. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I love an Australian person downplaying what should be the single most terrifying thing that you can describe, right? | ||
| If she believes what she's saying is true... | ||
| She thinks somebody used laser beams to set a fire. | ||
| And we can just take a picture of it. | ||
| And she's like, it's freaking laser beams! | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Moving on. | ||
| Where are the laser beams coming from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The sky! | |
| Is it a UFO? | ||
| Not important! | ||
| It's from the sky! | ||
| Right. | ||
| I heard that and I was like, I feel like Alex has got to be disappointed. | ||
| Like, going into break, he's got to be like, fuck! | ||
| I got laser beam, lady? | ||
| Why didn't I cut that call off sooner? | ||
| Jesus, what am I doing? | ||
| Anyway, he's basically done with the Australia portion of the show now, and he gets back to talking about Iran. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And, you know, on the next day, on Friday, you've got to get Steve Pachenik in there, because he's got some thoughts about the Holocaust. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Gotta be done. | ||
| Gotta be done. | ||
| I'm still not over that, by the way. | ||
| What? | ||
| That the Holocaust didn't happen? | ||
| That Steve says that. | ||
| That's deeply traumatic to me. | ||
| I feel really guilty. | ||
| You feel betrayed? | ||
| No, I feel guilty about not knowing. | ||
| I mean, I had no reason to know that about his beliefs. | ||
| But we've treated Steve as sort of like a goofy sideshow for quite a while. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And these sorts of revelations about him make me feel pretty... | ||
| Mixed about the previous conversation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I feel like if we found out that someone else that, you know, we know, I guess like... | ||
| I bet Carrie denies the Holocaust. | ||
| She has definitely some anti-Semitic leanings, but I haven't heard her go that far. | ||
| She has platform people who deny the Holocaust, for sure. | ||
| Like Jim Fetzer. | ||
| At this point, in this entire community, I just assume massive anti-Semitism until proven otherwise. | ||
| How do we now operate from a position of not just assuming eventually these people are going to deny the Holocaust? | ||
| How do we get introduced to a new person? | ||
| I can never see these folks with fresh eyes ever again. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You know, you give the benefit of the doubt for a little while, and then eventually... | ||
| Well, alright. | ||
| Man, you just don't know how many people deny the Holocaust until you're confronted with a... | ||
| Relative acquaintances just suddenly denying the Holocaust. | ||
| So Alex has Steve on on Friday in order to get to the bottom of that. | ||
| But he has another geopolitical expert that he's had on for years that went away for a while, but now is coming back into the fold. | ||
| And that is Joel Skousen. | ||
| So Alex introduces Joel. | ||
| Here's somebody who definitely believes the Holocaust happened. | ||
| And a wide-ranging knowledge. | ||
| Joel Skousen of worldaffairsbrief.com. | ||
| He's the editor of worldaffairsbrief.com. | ||
| It's excellent. | ||
| Also a former Marine Corps officer and naval aviator. | ||
| And his family's been fighting globalists for 60, 70 years. | ||
| Obviously, Cleon Skousen. | ||
| We wouldn't even know about the globalists if it wasn't for Cleon Skousen. | ||
| Probably the first person to ever use that term. | ||
| So Skousen's on for an interview, and I don't have any clips of it because fuck that dude. | ||
| I find him exceedingly boring. | ||
| It's just that he comes on and says that every single thing is a false flag. | ||
| That's like all he does. | ||
| He's on to tell Alex that Trump fucked up and fell for a globalist trick by killing Soleimani. | ||
| It appears that he thinks that this was a deep state setup and now Trump is being a real dick on Twitter and making things worse. | ||
| It's a dumb interview, but Alex is pretty receptive to Skousen's anti-Trump messaging. | ||
| Particularly given the circumstances where Alex is realizing that Trump is trying to provoke Iran and Iraq, kind of, with his threats and saying that we won't leave unless they pay us. | ||
| If there's a recipe for a dismount from Trump, it feels like this could be a path towards it. | ||
| Joel is untainted from the time that Alex spent with Trump because he had critical views of Trump the whole time and wasn't on for long stretches because of it. | ||
| And he still has a good rapport with Alex and the respect between them hasn't been diminished. | ||
| This is a good person to latch your wagon to now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right now, yeah. | |
| If you want to, Alex. | ||
| Plus, Joel Skousen is anti-communist royalty because he is W. Cleon Skousen's nephew. | ||
| If I were Alex, I would make a move now. | ||
| Get on board. | ||
| You have Joel Skousen. | ||
| You might got to get rid of Steve. | ||
| Going back to that well might have been a bad idea, but Joel Skousen is still there. | ||
| You can get back to your anti-communist bullshit with this. | ||
| This is a rock you can build on if you want to save whatever you can. | ||
| The rest of it's just going to be destroyed. | ||
| The rest of this is going to fall apart just naturally. | ||
| It's not the globalists doing it. | ||
| It's that you have built your house on sand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| I hate to give advice to Alex that could work, but... | ||
| Leaving Trump with Skousen is your best plan. | ||
| Leaving the planet with Klingon Skousen would probably be the better way. | ||
| You're not going to give me that one? | ||
| From hell's heart, I stab at the IRS. | ||
| What else you got? | ||
| We doing this? | ||
| I don't speak Klingon. | ||
| So I lied. | ||
| I actually do have one clip from the Skousen interview. | ||
| And it's them talking about QAnon. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Skousen hates QAnon. | ||
| Good! | ||
| But that's less important than Alex in this clip actually confirms a theory that we've had for a long time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Nothing that QAnon has said has ever come true. | ||
| This is a pure disinformation expert. | ||
| And sadly, a lot of Trump supporters, including some of my subscribers... | ||
| Well, I was thinking I'm just going to endorse it and then co-opt it publicly and go, Q says this, Q says that, because everybody loves little magic stuff, because it's definitely a delusional issue, and it's sucking up so many good people into it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So Alex is literally saying there that his plan was to co-opt QAnon and then use it as a vehicle to... | ||
| Pretend Q said certain things. | ||
| Should you be saying this out loud? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like that should have been an inside thought. | |
| That one you keep up in the brain. | ||
| I was planning to defraud people. | ||
| You don't let that one out your mouth. | ||
| That's what we've been saying all along. | ||
| With Zach, it was a big attempt to do exactly that. | ||
| Alex is basically saying, I had a grand plan to use this very successful thing in order to manipulate my audience. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| Why would you say that? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Because fucking... | ||
| Nobody's listening. | ||
| I think that's the real... | ||
| I think that's what we should take away from this. | ||
| At this point, nobody is listening. | ||
| Or Alex is in some way able to rationalize this that it's the greater good. | ||
| I would be using Q... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I would be using Q's voice to give good messages. | ||
| And that's just delusional. | ||
| You'd just be using it to sell your pills. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| He's just... | ||
| He's literally saying I was going to... | ||
| Defraud people. | ||
| I was going to lie to everybody who likes me. | ||
| That was my plan. | ||
| And if I had done that, Joel, I wouldn't be telling you about that plan. | ||
| I kind of hope to take over Q. Now, what's interesting about this is if you look at the history, it's absolutely... | ||
| Very likely that he did make serious gestures to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Zach is one of them, his fake intelligence guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And then the other one is that while Jerome Corsi was working at InfoWars, he started to become a big Q guy. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He started to decode Q clues, and he was going to write a book about it. | ||
| He was getting really on board with it, and it probably only ended because the followers started turning on Corsi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So then he had a hissy fit. | ||
| I think that Zach and Corsi were both attempts to co-opt that thing. | ||
| And this is exactly what Alex's pattern throughout his career is. | ||
| The Tea Party, QAnon, Trump, these are things that he recognizes potential in and gets on board with in order to absorb them or co-opt them into his revenue streams. | ||
| That's, I mean, in the same way that I was talking about earlier, Alex can't create, he can only absorb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| This is the attempt to do that. | ||
| He's admitting that that was his plan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, he's saying that he's like one of those cleaner fish for a shark. | ||
| That's all he can do. | ||
| He just swims around and cleans off the shark's back. | ||
| I was thinking more of the Borg. | ||
| The Borg? | ||
| You were thinking the Borg? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because of that Klingon reference earlier? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So, Alex, while talking to Skousen, you know, the idea is that Trump got set up by the deep state in order to do this. | ||
| Alex starts to sort of manufacture excuses and completely make stuff up about what Trump was going through in order to sort of... | ||
| He's trying to rationalize it. | ||
| He's trying to humanize the decision-making so he doesn't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Somewhat. | |
| You'll see. | ||
| The impeachment was hurting the globalists. | ||
| Trump's real numbers were way up, and I agree. | ||
| He sees it as, oh, it looks like I've been indicted. | ||
| He wants to change the subject, and I... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Did you guys just say... | ||
| Yeah, they're putting him into a situation, Alex, where they're going to have him go to war. | ||
| It's not going to turn out an easy war like Iraq. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's going to be damage all over the place. | |
| The Straits for Moses, as you said, is going to be shut down. | ||
| Oil prices are going to skyrocket, and Donald Trump is going to get blamed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's what I'm predicting. | |
| Because they told him, let's stop a Shiite uprising to take over Iraq. | ||
| He believes it, thinks he kills him. | ||
| That stops it. | ||
| Then they trick him into escalating, hitting cultural sites. | ||
| Then it's absolute jihad against Trump. | ||
| It blows up. | ||
| They activate sleeper cells all over the place. | ||
| And CNN's already scripting that it's all Trump's fault when those things happen. | ||
| Finally, CNN finds a war they didn't like, even though they're helping engineer the whole thing. | ||
| Back in two minutes. | ||
| Alex is just making all that up. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That is a fantasy of his. | ||
| Now, the reason that he's doing that is because he still needs to make the globalists the bad guy, even if he is recognizing that Trump trying to extort Iraq is not okay. | ||
| So I think that what he's doing is trying to judge Trump's actions. | ||
| By ascribing them to the globalists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the best he can do is that, like, Trump is gullible, and he got tricked because he was so upset about the impeachment, and he thought his numbers were going down, and so he committed a political assassination, which shouldn't be okay, but somehow is. | ||
| Well, he was put in that position. | ||
| Look, if the Democrats hadn't impeached him, then he wouldn't have assassinated that guy. | ||
| Clearly, that means it's the Democrats' fault. | ||
| It's cockamamie nonsense. | ||
| I mean, the best strategy... | ||
| I guess he feels that he has at this point is to say that Trump is incredibly weak and is willing to commit potentially international crimes in order to distract from an impeachment, which is exactly what he yells about Clinton all the time. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is nonsensical, but if it's leading to him leaving, it makes sense. | ||
| If not, if he's staying on board with Trump and using these sorts of thin... | ||
| Fucking rhetoric moves in order to justify it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was listening to a little bit of the show today. | ||
| Alex's show today. | ||
| We're recording this on the 7th. | ||
| I just wanted to get a sense of what's going on. | ||
| I just turned it on for a little bit. | ||
| He's screaming about how Mike Pompeo is the evil now. | ||
| He's the one. | ||
| Maybe that's the scapegoat he's going to go with. | ||
| Fuck Pompeo. | ||
| I know that in order to do this show, we've both kind of tacitly agreed that Occam's razor should stay outside while we're recording this. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But this one could not be... | ||
| Look at all the made-up nonsense that he tries to blast into one explanation when it's just very simple. | ||
| He's a fucking evil dude. | ||
| It's just so simple. | ||
| He's exactly what we've told you he was. | ||
| He's a con man who's a psychopath who is willing to commit war crimes like he said he wanted to do during the campaign. | ||
| Right, he did say that a bunch. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| So, yeah, I think that that's probably true. | ||
| And then also, just to be not singular in the focus, he also obviously has some terrible advisors around him. | ||
| No, he's surrounded by the people. | ||
| I mean, the reality is like... | ||
| Yes, this is... | ||
| Hey, take all that aside. | ||
| He's still responsible for this decision. | ||
| No, it's the Democrats. | ||
| They impeached him, Dan. | ||
| Even if the globalists, quote-unquote, tricked him into doing this... | ||
| Still his responsibility. | ||
| No, if the president gets tricked, it doesn't count. | ||
| Don't you remember? | ||
| That was Nixon's defense. | ||
| The buck stops over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| The buck stops with the Democrats no matter fucking what. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, Alex has another guest, and it's Chris Tonto Peranto. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| One of the survivors of Benghazi. | ||
| And I think he's just on to promote his new podcast. | ||
| I don't know what is going on. | ||
| Is he looking for guests? | ||
| This is a weird interview. | ||
| So he has him on, and if you recall, like I said, he's one of the survivors of Benghazi. | ||
| The interview is not very interesting to me, outside of what seems to be Tonto's main point, which seems to be that he's not happy that people were calling the situation at the Iraqi embassy another Benghazi. | ||
| He seems to take that personally, which I think is fair play. | ||
| Yeah, I'm for that. | ||
| I have no problem with that angle. | ||
| Good call. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, granted, Alex was saying that the globalists wanted the embassy to be Trump's Benghazi. | ||
| 100% was saying that. | ||
| So he's kind of guilty of exactly the thing that Tonto is taking issue with. | ||
| But for me, this is a little bit of a who cares situation. | ||
| All due respect to Tonto for his service, and I definitely see where he's coming from. | ||
| You know, being a Benghazi survivor, you wouldn't want your experience to be used as a political prop. | ||
|
unidentified
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Huh. | |
| Also, Alex tries to get Tonto to back him up that it's fucked up, that Trump is trying to get Iraq to pay for the base before we withdraw. | ||
| But Tonto is totally cool with that. | ||
| He says he's seen us leave bases before, and he's like, that's a lot of money we're leaving behind. | ||
| So it's a little uncomfortable. | ||
| Alex's big war hero guy that's on the show is invalidating his line with Trump. | ||
| Like, this is bullshit. | ||
| Like, nah, Tonto's like, nah, it's fine. | ||
| Ugh, Tonto. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's stupid and pointless, but Alex does say one thing that's pretty funny. | ||
| Tonto Paranto is our guest. | ||
| Tonto's been kicking butt again, best known for one of the heroes and survivors of Benghazi. | ||
| As you pointed out, though, the men that died still haven't even been given an award, which is, people aren't wanting awards, but it's kind of a slap in the face. | ||
| And he's pointing out that Trump hadn't done anything about that. | ||
| And again, it's not that we dislike Trump, it's that we're not in a cult here, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| And Trump noticed that almost, under Obama, nobody was getting awards, because it was a way to kind of put the military down. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So Alex is saying that President Obama didn't give out any awards. | ||
| You can't do that! | ||
| He's trying to demoralize. | ||
| You can't just do that! | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Did you know that Obama gave out the most presidential medals of freedom of any president ever? | ||
| Of course he did! | ||
| Of course he did! | ||
| He beat out number two on that list, Reagan, by 21 medals. | ||
| I was going over the list and one thing that stuck out to me is that Obama's list of recipients is pretty broad. | ||
| From like Maya Angelou to John Glenn to Bishop Desmond Tutu, Trump's list is mostly athletes. | ||
| Trump has given out 14 Medals of Freedom, and seven of them were to athletes. | ||
| The only non-athletes he's awarded are Orrin Hatch, Edwin Meese, who is the Reagan Attorney General who had to resign after a corruption scandal, Sheldon Adelson's wife Miriam, Antonin Scalia, economist and Trump advisor Arthur Laffer, and posthumously, Elvis Presley. | ||
| There was also a former Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Alan Page, who got an award, but he was also a former professional football player. | ||
|
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Wait, wait. | |
| So that one's kind of a push. | ||
| So Nixon and Elvis were friends and Elvis still didn't get a presidential medal of freedom? | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| That's fucked up, Nixon. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Also, everybody else, a murderer's row of evil. | ||
| Truly. | ||
| If anybody deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, those six names are the bottom of the list. | ||
| I suppose Eric Prince is down there. | ||
| Orrin Hatch, Antonin Scalia, Adelson's wife. | ||
| Adelson's wife? | ||
| Just fuck off. | ||
| Edwin Meese. | ||
| Which athletes? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I had the list. | ||
| Tiger Woods? | ||
| Tiger Woods? | ||
| No! | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| Presidential medals of freedom aren't necessarily military awards. | ||
| Although Obama did give one to a military figure, and Trump has not at this point. | ||
| So even that argument doesn't really make sense. | ||
| I imagine the next guy to commit a war crime is going to get a medal. | ||
| I thought, why not check other awards, like Purple Hearts? | ||
| Surely Obama gave out some of those. | ||
| And of course he did. | ||
| It's a fucking huge list. | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| Obama gave out plenty of medals of honor also, which are specifically for military members. | ||
| The point Alex wants to make is that the people at Benghazi have not been awarded any of these medals yet, which is fair enough as a point. | ||
| But he's extending that point far past the marker where it becomes a complete lie, which it is. | ||
| It's a complete lie. | ||
| If you want to just talk specifically about the people who died and the survivors of Benghazi not getting these awards yet... | ||
| You can have that conversation. | ||
| And it's what Tonto is bringing up, and he does extend it even to Trump not giving these awards to these people. | ||
| It is a fair conversation. | ||
| It's not fair when you turn it into Obama's trying to demoralize the military by not giving out awards. | ||
| It's just a lie. | ||
|
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They just don't care. | |
| They just don't. | ||
| Like, anything. | ||
| And everything that could possibly be pinned on Obama. | ||
| Guys! | ||
| He's just a black president. | ||
| That doesn't make him infinitely evil. | ||
|
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That doesn't mean that he's not giving out medals. | |
| What's insane, too, is that there are fair criticisms that could be made. | ||
| So many! | ||
| And they aren't coming from Alex. | ||
| Ever! | ||
| These criticisms that do come up are either lies or just complete misrepresentations. | ||
| And you would think, if you really wanted to make... | ||
| Hard-hitting points, you would go with real criticisms. | ||
| And somehow you don't. | ||
| Well, it's probably because Alex doesn't read anything. | ||
| You know, it's a bad day to criticize... | ||
| If you're a Trump supporter, it's a bad day to criticize Obama's expansion of the drone program without mentioning... | ||
| It does get messy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he did wear a tan suit that one time. | ||
| And there was a mustard situation. | ||
| So we have one last clip here, and it's Alex getting to wrapping things up with a sales pitch. | ||
| And I find this to be grim. | ||
| Our audience is an audience. | ||
| You're activists. | ||
| You're winners. | ||
| You're incredible. | ||
| Let me speak of this. | ||
| If we get finance, we can complete this year, go into the next year, and keep fighting. | ||
| You know they want to shut us down. | ||
| Don't let them win, folks. | ||
| We need to stay in attack formation. | ||
| This isn't a gimmick when I say, oh, yesterday was the last day of the super end-of-year mega-sale, but I'm extending it because I'm so busy. | ||
| I'm very busy. | ||
| I haven't got all the new ads for the new specials that are excellent specials. | ||
| They're just not as wide, and we'll never have specials. | ||
| It's probably this big again unless we're going out of business. | ||
| I mean, this year in sales, we don't have inventory taxes and things. | ||
| So, you know a company is doing well when their CEO is doing an ad read saying, we'll never have sales like this unless we're going out of business. | ||
| And no, I'm not just pretending to be busy to extend the sale a little longer like I always do. | ||
| It's totally because I'm super busy running this very healthy business that's not about to collapse. | ||
| That inspires confidence. | ||
| Also, this episode is on the 6th. | ||
| On the 7th, when I was listening to a little bit of the show, they ran an ad that cut from this. | ||
| This clip from the 6th is already in an ad on the 7th. | ||
| How busy are you? | ||
| And he does say, okay, sales might end in two days because the editors have to put together the ads. | ||
| Whoever the editor was that put together this ad that airs on the 7th from audio from the 6th. | ||
| Texas is the only competent InfoWars employee up to this day. | ||
| Well, then it clearly shows that whatever the holdup is is not what you say it is. | ||
| It might be inventory taxes. | ||
| Texas is one of eight states in the United States where companies are taxed on all their carried over inventory at the end of the year. | ||
| The reasoning is that the state wants to disincentivize businesses to produce large amounts of inventory that they can hoard so they can fuck with their workers with decreased hours and layoffs during slower times. | ||
| Alex is letting slip a little bit that his gigantic sale at the end of the year was about avoiding paying inventory tax on the products left in his warehouse come January. | ||
| That's some sleazy shit right there, but I would also kind of bet that he did that because he can't afford to pay those taxes. | ||
| Earlier in the show, Alex said that he had to cancel that new show that he launched, Firepower, because they couldn't afford to pay the board operators. | ||
| They just launched that show like a month or two ago. | ||
| This is an impressive failure speed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| David Knight has still managed to maintain his show for a couple years now, and I'm certain that no one likes it, and it is not a positive return on investment. | ||
| Either Alex is in really bad financial straits right now, and he had to manipulate his audience into helping him offload his pills so he wouldn't have to pay taxes on them, or he's doing okay, but he's reached a point where pretending that he's going out of business is the only play he has left to milk sales out of his committed base. | ||
| Neither option is great. | ||
| So, good luck, Alex. | ||
| Hopefully 2019 is the last year you even have to think about inventory taxes. | ||
| This is a mess. | ||
| Whatever it is, he's manipulated his audience. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I didn't know that a radio show could run the same way that mattress stores do. | ||
| Going out of business forever. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Eventually, that thread will be less compelling to his audience. | ||
| I don't think it's a good long-term strategy. | ||
| Yeah, usually that's the definition of diminishing returns. | ||
| So, anyway, this brings us to the end of this episode. | ||
| I think it's really interesting because you see this pivot that happens just over the course of an hour related to the Australian fires. | ||
| You see the bullshit. | ||
| You see the attacking the climate change advocacy position by extraneous points that have nothing to do with the arguments being made. | ||
| You see all that. | ||
| It's really fascinating to me. | ||
| And then... | ||
| You see this weird thing with Iran, where Alex clearly has a line, but also, even if Trump is past that line, he has to make it the globalists' fault. | ||
| He can't allow, it's too threatening to the last years of his life to accept that Trump is doing these things because he wants to. | ||
| Because he said he was going to do that. | ||
| So I think that that's a really interesting development, and I am interested to see where that goes. | ||
| If the combined circumstances are correct and they work in the right way, I do think that if Trump carries on this way continually and keeps going down this road, it could lead to Alex having to make a decision. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I'm also... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm at the point where I'm so fucking jaded by the idea of like, this will get him to leave. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Until Trump doesn't have power. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's when everybody, once Trump is out of power, will be like, and I condemn, I roundly condemn all of the things that Trump... | ||
| And I don't like the way he treated... | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| But he's not going to criticize him. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| Really, until... | ||
| Yeah, we'll see. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And that's why their main goal is to make sure he never leaves power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, anyway, we'll be back, Jordan, on our next episode. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight and at go to bed, Jordan. | ||
| You can find us on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook, and you can go to iTunes, download podcasts, leave a review, say nice things, donate all. | ||
| Have a great time. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZXClark. | ||
| I was eaten by a mountain lion. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |