January 6, 2020 episode dissects Alex Jones’ shifting narratives on Australia’s bushfires—dismissing climate change as media hysteria tied to Al Gore and carbon taxes, then blaming China without evidence, despite a 169-page Columbia University report proving its climate efforts. He pivots to arson conspiracies (24 arrests out of 183 charged) and falsely links California’s wildfires to mountain lion attacks, ignoring wind-driven fire realities. Inconsistencies reveal profit-driven manipulation, from QAnon co-opting to scapegoating globalists for Trump’s policies, exposing a pattern of outdated claims and financial desperation. [Automatically generated summary]
I guess what I, you know, since you're now opening up to like 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 like undertoes.
It's just like feeling your body like ripped around by the water and like you know to tread water, you know to swim, but you do those things and it doesn't seem to help you.
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 fooey to it.
And I think that a lot of it is because, you know, I'd be listening to the episodes and just be Alex and Roger Stone talking shit about nothing.
Yeah.
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.
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 Qassam Suleimani.
Loves it.
Well, wants to not appear to love it, but seems to love it.
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 like this isn't going to be pleasant.
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.
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.
Now, at the Golden Globes, a number of people gave speeches that like Cape Blanchette, Joaquin Phoenix 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 got to cover it.
His initial take on this is that it's no big deal.
This is just 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.
But the big story is the 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.
Before we get into any of this, you know, like, 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.
Like, 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.
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.
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.
Fizz.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.
2019 was the hottest and driest year on record for Australia, according to their Bureau of Meteorology, which puts these pieces in place for what we're seeing now.
There's not a lot of mystery about this in the expert community, but somehow to Alex, discussing the impact that climate change has on making these climate events more severe is somehow proof of a grand conspiracy.
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.
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 subsidize 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 polluter 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, like Al Gore owns the climate Chicago Exchange.
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 could 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.
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 that this is normal kind of angle.
So there you can see the theme of his main argument at the beginning of the show.
It's just normal.
People doing controlled burns to make sure a plentiful harvest shop.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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 the next season, but 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 shit.
Hitler could never get bombers over 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 us.
Just like China has many more times coal power plants than we have.
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 for 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.
Well, but he's saying that that is what clean coal is.
And he doesn't understand that, like, 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.
No.
He's just saying that we have this clean coal stuff going on and all the plants emit are 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.
No.
I don't think the words that he's saying make sense.
I just don't 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 hear this and I'm just like, this is sad.
But actually, we have a moment here where we 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.
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.
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 monstrous.
You are right that it is a very simple and elemental thought that we shouldn't be running an international protection ring.
Right.
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.
So what's happened here is that in the aftermath of the assassination of Qassam Suleimani, 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...
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, Trump has threatened to, quote, charge them sanctions like they've never seen before, ever.
And if I support that, I will lose any of the Ron Paul anti-interventionist types that are my bedrock, that 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.
They just don't like the fact that there's an end that isn't like we unequivocally won.
Like they like the people who want 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.
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 Kate Blanchett and others and their speeches.
So he's complaining about how Blanchette said, you know, 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?
So when China, who's responsible for over half the trash in the world, they admit, dumping the ocean, by 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.
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 could impose sanctions, but I don't know if that's going to work.
You can cut off trade with them.
But Alex isn't dumb enough to think that that's a viable path.
So 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.
Within, you know, more, like, obviously not talking about a one-world government necessarily, but in terms of international bodies that have enforcement mechanisms in place.
Yeah.
You could do that.
Like, hey, China, you are polluting in ways that are affecting other countries.
Whether it would end up being like a financial punitive thing in order to help the country that's affected clean up from the mess that China's making, or some kind of punitive measure that's taken to make them stop doing that.
International bodies can do that.
Nationalist countries independently acting cannot really.
There's far too much interconnectedness for us all to ever really.
And we know a lot more than we used to about the ways that, let's say, air pollution in the, like, let's say, most northern parts of America can affect Canada.
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 learned 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.
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.
David Sandalau 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 and 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 accomplished 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 20s, 10 years.
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.
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.
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.
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 that that's.
It's not a matter of that system no, preferable it is.
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.
Yeah, and one of the things that I think was really interesting about reading that climate uh report, the uh from the Columbia UH Energy Policy Center, was that 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 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 approach that they've taken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I should tell you there have 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.
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.
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.
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Look out, don't go to California, get eaten by a mountain lion.
Yeah, I get the sense that he just thinks like, ah, this makes me sound like 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.
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 both here and in California, those things have been planned for us.
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.
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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 not mean something.
You know what I mean?
So that's been sort of a decade that they've labeled Brisbane as Australia's new world city.
And I'm like thinking, well, what does that mean?
And then all these sort of pieces of the puzzle are coming together that if this is true, they have this is the cheaper option of destroying that, all of that bushland leading from Melbourne to Brisbane to clear the way for these rails and these cities.
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 like a promotional campaign.
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.
Evidence is mounting that the mega fires 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.
And unfortunately, in that reaction to it, she's just been like pushed towards this awful information.
And so how to like 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.
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, all right, let's dismiss this out of hand.
But I wanted to check in on the article to get a sense of the information PJ Dubbs 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 subheadline 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?
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 straw man 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.
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.
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 Seven News Sydney.
This is a reference to a tweet that Seven 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.
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.
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.
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.
You know, it's more than, you know, look, if somebody, if they put a, like 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 did it.
Imagine if it was your entire fucking continent was on fire.
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.
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.
It'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 because you could imagine how that could get so incredibly out of control.
Like 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 like kill him?
And the other issue, why it would be dangerous, like scapegoating stuff, is that according to the BBC, there are between 52 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.
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.
Yeah.
But you don't want to create a Frankenstein's monster situation where the town is coming.
The interesting thing is that they don't crystallize what the argument they're refuting is that the 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.
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.
And what?
But 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, 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 at the industrial level added as part of this international secret agreement.
And it's actually messing with the atmosphere, but oh, don't, 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.
Look, as insufferable as I find actors and celebrities to be for the most part, I wish more conservatives knew that the main reason their fervor to hate California is drummed up is because rich people don't make as much money.
But the Chinese government is paying arsonists to set fires to clear the area in order to prepare it 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.
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 burn bullshit.
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 in.
His ability to go from like 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.
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 till the driest time of the year, setting the fires, burning up all these corridors right where the Chinese are putting in light rail.
Whereas at the beginning of the show, you know, 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.
So Alex has got another caller from Australia who is certain that this is a Agenda 2030 globalist shop.
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 sort of what 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.
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 it's been the photograph's been tampered with.
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 coming from the same place.
So I got to say, if you're going to go around with the laser beam stuff, I'm going to treat your thoughts about the light rail and that grand conspiracy with the exact same disdain and dismissiveness.
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 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 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 Suleimani.
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.
Right now, 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.
Like, this is a rock you can build on if you want to save whatever you can.
There's the rest of it's just going to be destroyed.
Like, the rest of this is going to fall apart just naturally.
This is a pure disinformation expert, and um, sadly, a lot of Trump supporters, including my some of my subscribers, I was thinking, I was thinking I'm just going to endorse it and then co-opt it publicly and go, Jesus, Q says this, Q says that, because everybody loves all magic stuff because it's definitely a delusional issue and it's sucking up so many good people into it.
So Alex, while talking to Skousen, 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 rationalize humanize the decision-making so he doesn't somewhat.
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.
And the best he can do is that 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 no.
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.
Yeah, 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, as we're recording this on the 7th.
And because I just wanted to get a sense of what's going on, I just turned it on for a little bit, and he's screaming about how Mike Pompeo is the one.
So it's like, okay, maybe that's the scapegoat he's going to go with: fuck Pompeo.
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 Tanto'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.
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.
Also, Alex tries to get Tonto to back him up that it's fucked up, that Trump is going to, you know, he's 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.
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 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.
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 Oren Hatch, Edwin Meese, who's 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.
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 that, like, 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 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 doesn't want to, it wants to disincentivize businesses to produce large amounts of inventory that they can hoard so they can fuck with their workers with like 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.
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.
So anyway, this brings us to the end of this episode.
I think it's really interesting because you see like this pivot that happens just over the course of like 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 that'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.
So I think that that's a really interesting development.
And I am interested to see where that goes because 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 at the point where I'm so fucking jaded by the idea of like, this will get him to leave.