Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Alex Jones’ January 8, 2020, episode, exposing his baseless Islamophobia—claiming Muslims over 10% disrupt societies while mocking his "Winter White House" error and reliance on debunked sources like Zachary Clawan’s unverified military harassment claims. Jones also falsely ties Obama’s $1.7B Iran payment to attacks on influencers, pivots to racially charged juvenile justice lies, and peddles iodine supplement scams via manipulated Wikipedia stats. A staged caller confrontation ends with Jones screaming slurs at a critic, excusing it as "fun." Their analysis reveals Jones’ fear-driven narratives prioritize conflict over facts, weaponizing conspiracy theories for profit and bigotry. [Automatically generated summary]
And then on Tuesday night, on the 7th of January, Iran shot some missiles at targets in Iraq.
Sure.
And the world was in a pretty tense situation.
Not knowing exactly what was going to happen.
Was Trump going to return?
That results.
Yeah.
And so I wanted to check back in because I thought it would be pretty important to cover the January 8th episode where Alex is responding to the night priors.
Responding to the missiles.
But I knew that by Monday, probably something else is going to happen.
The president, just about five minutes ago, completed a lengthy speech that went about 45 minutes, where he attempted to de-escalate the situation with Iran.
We'll be playing large excerpts of that speech today.
Now, admittedly, in the past four years, I have heard Trump speak for the longest concurrent length of time was two and a half minutes, and that felt like 45.
It's okay for you to not listen to that much of Trump because you're not a guy with an audience who screams about how great Trump is and how everybody should be on board with him and he's bringing back America and all this.
So Alex, talking about this speech, he brings up something that Trump says in the speech that Alex, I don't think, should be in favor of, but he does seem to be, and I think it's a little bit weird.
Trump did call for NATO to get, quote, much more involved in the Middle East process.
His angle is pretty much exactly the same as Alex's.
Like, we're only interested in the Middle East because of energy-related concerns, and we don't really care too much now that we're supposedly energy-independent.
And that's some sick shit that gives a glimpse into how these people think.
I mean, compared to the alternative of the two of them, like rattling sabers or God forbid, Trump militarily responding, I kind of prefer the idea of them just talking dumb shit.
I read Trump's speech, and I don't think he was making a dick joke.
He was being serious?
I think he was just saying we have better missiles than Iran.
I don't think there was a joke.
I think it was more of a threat than anything else.
Also, Trump announced, quote, punishing economic sanctions that he was going to put in place, in addition to the sanctions that are already there.
This will largely hurt the Iranian people, and Alex knows that.
I know that he knows that because he's yelled about sanctions killing Iraqis many, many times in the past, when doing so has helped him attack Madeline Albright.
Alex knows damn well what Trump is doing is engaging in economic warfare that'll tend to hurt and kill civilians in Iran, but he doesn't care.
It's an economic sanctions thing just because of the way that the world works.
And I'm not some sort of expert and I don't know, but it seems really obviously fucked up to me that everybody goes apeshit if Trump murders a guy, but everybody's like, well, it's the safe option if he imposes economic sanctions that are going to murder regular people.
Well, I'd say drudgereport.com is the best up-the-minute global newspaper that's headlines accurately represent what Trump's speech was about 12 minutes long, but the buildup was 45 minutes of them with a live feed of the White House electorner.
This is just a clear indication that he'd just seen these headlines on Drudge before he got on air and was making things up.
Also, even though Alex is making a correction here, he's also making a new error.
He's saying that Trump was speaking from the Winter White House, which is Mar-a-Lago, but Trump was at the White House.
Alex should be ashamed of himself, calling one of Trump's properties the Winter White House.
What would Thomas Jefferson think about something like that?
What would they write in the Federalist Papers about an aristocrat ascending to the presidency and branding one of his properties as being equivalent to the seat of the U.S. government?
I'd suspect they would not be too into it.
And I would love to make up a quote, but I don't have it in there.
This is all Alex responding to Trump's speech, and it's kind of an attempt to talk about news stuff, but it's not really what's important about this episode.
As Alex gets into the second segment of his show, he launches into a profoundly Islamophobic rant for no reason.
He dives into outright hatred that spirals out of control and will come back up later in the episode.
And the left that's always telling us that America's bad and Christianity's bad and we oppress women sycophantically worshiping something that basically puts garbage bags over women or beekeeper suits.
It fundamentally scares me, pisses me off, and makes me revile it.
I don't remember if he was very specific about the age of the people, but whatever the case, now we see that he hates to see Muslims at a hamburger place that he likes.
He doesn't want to live in a world where groups he doesn't like get to exist in public spaces.
It's just that simple with him.
This 10% thing seems to track back to a book written by a missionary named Peter Hammond called Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam.
The point of the book appears to be the countries need to keep their Muslim population under 2% because if that number gets any higher, the Muslims start to act in predictable, disruptive ways.
I read a breakdown of the book, and it's not even an idea worth engaging with, mostly because it makes no sense on its face.
Hammond is arguing that there are various levels at which Muslim populations will begin acting differently.
Like at 2%, they start to make street and prison gangs, or at 5%, they push for supermarkets to offer halal options.
He then lists countries on each level, and it makes his point make no sense at all.
In his breakdown, the U.S. is listed as having a 0.6% Muslim population, but we have a really big halal food market in this country.
Everything that he's saying, like these distinctions between the categories of 2%, 5%, it's all meaningless stuff.
Because the bigger issue is that what Hammond is doing is taking these very complicated situations in different countries and different regions, and he's boiling it down to a single variable that is how many Muslims are there?
It's the sort of argument that plays really well in like white nationalist and Christian identity extremist circles, but no serious person would even consider that theory as having like being worth a second thought.
But you see here how Alex has accepted that as truth.
It's just the reality to him that if your country goes to a 10% Muslim population, they're going to start taking over and putting in Sharia law.
This is gross rhetoric.
And the end result of this kind of thinking has to either lead to war, extermination, dislocation, or a eugenics program.
Alex isn't stupid enough not to realize that.
He's just fine with those things being directed towards people he doesn't want to see when he's trying to get a hamburger.
You can look directly at the interconnectedness of all of these different countries and their individual contexts and histories and all of that stuff and consider on a nuanced level what it is that it means and how it really applies to different spaces.
Or, Dan, you could estimate how many Muslims there are in a place and make long and stupid pronouncements about it.
Now, that said, I was against the wars going on in the Middle East because they were adventurous and they were removing people that were a lot better than what the globalists were putting in because the globalists were wanting to destabilize Islam to break its borders, put radicals in, and then use it as a weapon against the West.
And the thing that bums me out is that maybe there's no better example or representation of a culture assimilating into America than going and hanging out at a fucking mall.
We don't wear Halloween costumes in America unless it's Halloween.
We don't make women wear bags over their heads.
And then the left's sick of fanatically loving it and promoting it and coddling it and making sure little girls wear full face masks in school and little girls take them off and the school reports from their parents and they get beaten.
It's important to remember that what sparked this rant is Alex talking about seeing two groups of people he assumed were Muslims at a hamburger place the night before.
When he's talking about how these people need to go back to their countries and more important to Alex, stay out of his country.
He's not talking about anyone who's guilty of the sort of behaviors he's describing, like killing women or pedophilia.
This is the response that he has to people he assumes are Muslims being in a restaurant.
This is a deep level of bigotry.
And I want to say, from my assessment, from everything that I know from listening to so much, Alex, this is the real Alex Jones.
I completely reject Alex's argument about these Muslims just making him mad because they aren't adopting whatever he thinks our ways are.
And you're totally- They're eating a damn hamburger.
Exactly.
That's the reason.
That's the reason.
Because when he gets the most mad at specific Muslims, it's generally a situation where he sees Muslims integrating.
He yells abstractly about Muslims and Islam in general quite a bit.
But there's something different and more intense about these rants that he goes on when he sees Muslim women at the pool supply shop or them at the hamburger store.
This is the thing.
Alex wants a holy war between Islam and Christianity.
He wants a new crusade, but he knows that in the modern civilized world, he can't call for that.
But what he can do is create constant narratives about Islam being incompatible with the West and paint the picture that they're already in a holy war against him.
This is why Muslims in a pool supply shop or a hamburger stand completely fuck him up.
It's because they're proof that Muslims are perfectly compatible with our way of life.
When Alex sees Muslims engaging in the exact same behaviors as he himself is engaging in, it's a strong indication that coexistence is not only possible, but it's happening.
And that's threatening to his belief in and desire for civilizational level conflict.
Alex isn't really mad when he sees news of an Islamic extremist carrying out, like, let's say a knife attack in the UK.
I would suggest that when they talk about that stuff, they're not talking about movies.
They're talking about foreign policy.
Yeah.
They're not as petty and stupid as someone like Alex who just gets bogged down in cultural issues and little petty grievances about women in lead roles and movies and shit.
That's not a thing that they're operating off of.
It's what we have done to the Middle East in the past 20 years.
It should be pointed out that Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, England.
It's not a site where experts believe human sacrifice was carried out.
However, there is another similar site in Germany, which is closer to what Alex is talking about.
An article in the Smithsonian includes this line, quote, it shares similarities with its famed cousin in Britain, and its builders perform many of the same rituals, though they added a new twist, human sacrifice.
The words new twist certainly should get the message across to people who study that people who study Stonehenge don't believe that it was used as a human sacrifice site.
Even in the case of the German site, they only say that human sacrifice is, quote, a likely scenario.
While pointing out that the trauma of the bodies found there could have alternative explanations, like inner conflict, inner group conflicts, that sort of thing, raids.
There's one skeleton that was found around the year 2000 from Stonehenge that people have theorized could be the victim of sacrifice, but other believe that the evidence could point in plenty of other directions.
And also, the person that the skeleton is of, they would have died in around 600 AD, which is way too late for Stonehenge.
Given that this is like one of the only real pieces of evidence that tends towards the conclusion of human sacrifice taking place at Stonehenge, it would be pretty irresponsible to jump to the conclusion just from that without any supporting evidence.
A lot of the beliefs that dumb people like Alex have about Stonehenge come from 17th century historians whose theories about Stonehenge being a druidic temple have been thoroughly debunked.
But these ideas are really popular for a while.
There was one stone there that was nicknamed the slaughtering stone because rainwater would pool in it and turn red.
The imagination was, you know, that this is proof of long-lingering blood, but it's really just the result of algae and iron.
There's a whole lot of bullshit surrounding Stonehenge, and it appears that Alex believes all of it to the point where he's able to whip himself into a frenzy just by being near it.
So he gets off this Islamophobic chunk here and starts talking about the night before and how the media was covering things.
He plays what he thinks is a gotcha clip from, I believe, MSNBC about the reporting of possible fatalities and deaths in the attack on the bases in Iraq.
And I want to play this clip because last night I'm up here and I noticed we started reporting because it was on MSNBC that, oh, Iran is saying 20 dead, 30 dead, 18 dead.
And I just said, listen, Iran's going to say that for their own domestic population.
We're not hearing those reports.
And sure enough, it turned out those were false reports, not our reports.
We were just reporting what was being reported, which is normal, but just saying we don't believe this.
And thank God it wasn't true.
Let's play clip 12.
MSNBC amplified fake news that Iranian attack had killed 30 U.S. soldiers.
Here it is.
unidentified
We're just getting reports now that a second wave of rocket attacks have been launched from Iran.
The IRGC was saying that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of this country, was in the control center coordinating these attacks.
This is this bit I'm not sure about, but Iran's state media is claiming that 30 U.S. soldiers have been killed in this attack.
Now, this is not confirmed.
This is just coming from Iranian media.
But we have just stopped the precipice, Chris.
We have entered a very unpredictable time.
We have to see what the response is going to be from the United States.
Here's where things get really interesting in the live stream from the night of the 7th.
Alex is talking about this.
Some people are saying that there's 20 dead, but he has a more important narrative that he wants to pitch, which is his way of making himself a major part of the story.
Given the intelligence, which started to come out tonight at a top-level meeting where the Gang of Eight was given some information about what that intelligence held.
We're going to learn more about that potentially tomorrow.
And I think actually, you know, looking into initially why I jumped to the live stream was to see if he was being unfair about his own coverage about the deaths.
So in the live stream Alex did this evening on the 7th, in response to the missile attack, he had Zach back on.
For those of you new to the show, Zach was Alex's fake intelligence source who was an attempt to take over the internet space that was occupied by QAnon.
Which I always thought was me and my buddy Nikki Gifts always thought that was really funny that this guy choosing a rap name just chose fucking baseball.
So, Zach and I have something in common in that we both didn't finish high school.
I dropped out, but Zach was actually expelled from school for having a gun on school grounds, as reported in a 2008 article in the Herald Tribune.
The article was about how 10 students were barred from graduation ceremonies because of explicit and threatening rap songs they'd performed and posted online, I believe, as the article is saying, on MySpace.
Apparently, they were pretty antagonistic to their rival high school, Lakewood Ranch.
And the song included lyrics like, quote, Lakewood Boys is gonna bleed.
Zach had been kicked out of school for having a gun the year prior, but was still one of the rappers on this track, threatening his old school's rival.
So that tells me he's very cool.
To be clear, I'm less concerned with the rap song.
So after this, Zach enlisted in the army, and he reached the rank of specialist by 2010, which is the rank just directly above private first class.
That year, Zach went public with allegations that he'd been harassed in the service because he's a Muslim.
In an article in ABC News, Zach tells a story of being the subject of abuse as soon as basic training started, with his drill instructor singling him out and mocking the idea of him attending Islamic religious services.
He was specifically selected to portray a terrorist in training exercises.
A fellow soldier desecrated his Quran by tearing out pages and tossing them around.
They would call him, quote, raghead, sand monkey, and Zachary bin Laden.
One day, three weeks into his time at Fort Hood, Zach found a piece of paper in the windshield wiper of his truck that said, quote, hey, carpet jockey, go back where you came from.
After the Fort Hood shooting, it got so bad that he had to be moved off the base for his own safety.
In 2010, there were memos written.
I found these memos that were written by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense regarding Zach's allegations of harassment.
In the memos, it says, quote, the attached letter addressed to the Secretary of Defense concerns alleged harassment of a Muslim soldier assigned to Fort Hood.
The letter is from the Council on American Islamic Relations on behalf of Army Specialist Zachary Klawan.
Alex has repeatedly and consistently called CARE a terrorist organization.
But when Zach was dealing with a very serious situation, they were who he went to for help.
After this, Zach went on CNN and Al Jazeera to do interviews about how the Army had ignored his complaints about religious harassment and how there's a serious problem with Islamophobia in the military.
I found some blogs talking about him having a lawsuit against the Army, but I don't fully trust those sites, and I wasn't able to find concrete evidence of the lawsuit, though I accept it's probably true.
Sure.
He probably did have this lawsuit.
I don't care to comb through Zach's social media posts or anything like that, but a couple of interesting things do come up if you Google his name.
One is his LinkedIn page, which says that he's retired from the Army.
I'm not positive when he left, but I would not be surprised if it wasn't too long after he started going around domestic and foreign news programs talking about how the army training includes propaganda against Islam.
But it does come up, and who knows what that means.
I can find no indication that Zach has any relation to the military at this point in his life other than that he used to be a specialist in the army.
I can find no evidence that he was in the intelligence field, and honestly, a lot of that stuff just seems to be made up.
My heart goes out to him for the harassment he said he had to endure while he was enlisted, but I can't help but wonder how he could possibly be the type of person who would go on the news and do interviews about anti-Muslim bigotry in the army, and also the type of person who would be okay associating with Alex Jones, an extreme anti-Muslim bigot.
I could speculate on that, but it would be kind of pointless.
As it stands now, I just don't think that there's any reason to take anything he's saying to Alex seriously.
He was formerly in the military, but so what?
So was the dude who lived next door to me when I was 19, who I smoked weed with.
And really, it's an interesting portrait because I think the fact that gone to school and got expelled is relevant, but also not the biggest deal in the world.
Because I don't know if there's any indication that he brought it in a threatening way.
Not the same as bringing it to school to threaten people.
But I think the most important thing is this, there's a lot of trail in his life that is speaking out against anti-Muslim bigotry in the army.
It makes no sense for him to be on InfoWars.
There's something up here.
And I don't know what it is.
It could be a situation where he lost it.
He completely.
Sure.
But also, you could see a situation where, because of his experiences, because of the inaction on the part of the army, he could have a really serious resentment against the United States government and the army itself.
The point in the accurate intel is that they are targeting, and when I say they, when you talk about cuts forces, when you talk about individuals who happen to be in the country around the world who are well-trained and getting orders is to attack social media influencers, media influencers, protectors of America, people who have a platform, political figures, and eventually with the fatwa, the bounty on the president of the United States head.
Alex is saying this is pretty good to Owen because he knows that the angle is pretty good one as a way to make the story about himself, hopefully to boost traffic to Infowars and make some money.
And Zach is clearly a participant, but I'm not sure how much of that is based on collaboration between him and Alex or how much it's just him knowing what Alex likes and needs.
I don't know what's going on here precisely, but whatever it is falls directly under the headline of manipulation.
It's possible that Zach was listening to him, looking for clues of ways to build on the narrative.
Sure.
And he's operating completely on his own.
It's also possible that when Alex called him earlier before having him on, he was saying, like, all right, look, the angle we're going with is the Iranians are going to be attacking me.
And so, like, yes, there is other possible explanations for why he would say this is pretty good to Owen while in the middle of his fake intelligence source saying that you guys are the real targets.
I was listening to this and I just thought, like, I mean, first of all, it's interesting now that we know who Zach is to get a picture of him and see how incongruous what he's doing now is with what he was doing, let's say, eight years ago.
But Alex is using Zach, his high-profile intelligence, fake QAnon guy, to push forth and to launder the narrative that his intel sources are saying that people like Alex are going to be the targets.
Granted, this is a completely symbolic gesture and means nothing from a legal perspective, but I would say it's a pretty good indication of the mood.
Mary McCord, the legal director for the Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, recently wrote a piece in the Washington Post that had an interesting take on this gun sanctuary trend that's going on.
From the article, quote, Virginia state law prohibits local governments from enacting ordinances or resolutions that are inconsistent with state laws, and more directly, specifically prohibits local governments from regulating firearms.
So unless he's going to amend his position that the Constitution, you know, he says, he's going to have to say it's really about the counties or something.
He's going to have to recognize that these county resolutions are meaningless.
No, there's only one thing that these guys believe, which is that democracy is great so long as everybody agrees with what I say.
And if by some evil circumstance the evil Democrats who disagree with me steal their way into office, I ignore them completely because democracy isn't democracy unless everybody agrees with me.
So the article goes on to mention that an 1886 Supreme Court ruling, Presser v. Illinois, ruled that the Second Amendment, quote, does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations, which it's noted are actually illegal according to the constitutions of 48 states, including Virginia.
This is a problem because at this point in the episode, like I said, Alex is on the phone with this guy who's literally talking about how he's organizing a private militia.
This is a public discussion of an explicit crime and a violation of the Virginia Constitution.
People like Alex and the Oath Keepers are whipping gun weirdos into a complete frenzy that could lead to dangerous results.
Their argument is bad.
Local governments can't do anything close to what they're pretending they can.
And if a local government is in opposition to the laws of the state, their only real recourse is to challenge the state law in court, which would likely not work in this case.
They kind of know that that path wouldn't work, so it looks like they're committed to angling for some kind of a standoff, which is a really bad sign.
And also, Alex can fuck himself with that pretty much everyone supported Eisenhower sending in the National Guard to protect the black students in Little Rock when the schools were desegregated bullshit.
Whenever you look at all those videos of people watching everybody was like, yay, there were definitely no like newspaper articles after newspaper articles decrying how evil and tyrannical it was that Eisenhower would have the gall, the gall to enforce the Constitution they love so much.
Maybe it's because a whole lot of people were super racist and not in favor of integration.
I don't want to descend too deeply into this issue, but you know who was super not into Eisenhower sending the National Guard to protect these students?
Six years after Eisenhower sent in the guard, then governor of Alabama, George Wallace, held his stand-in-the-schoolhouse door event, where racists tried to keep schools segregated by physically blocking black students from entering.
This was part of his philosophy, which, if you recall, was segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
I bring this up because Wallace physically tried to stop black kids from going to school in 1963, which brought him a bunch of attention.
It also required JFK to federalize the Alabama National Guard to get Wallace to stop being an asshole.
Wallace being a national star among racists after this point, he really rose in ascendancy.
And he parlayed that into presidential runs in 1964 and 1968.
So many of Alex's spiritual ancestors were George Wallace supporters.
Gary Allen, the guy who wrote Alex Jones' favorite book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, served as Wallace's speechwriter during both of his presidential campaigns.
George Wallace's campaign deployed rhetoric that mirrored that of the John Birch Society.
And he actually said, I have no problem with the John Birch Society.
And his staff was full of birchers.
And he almost chose a notorious bircher, Ezra Taft Benson, as his running mate.
Benson, as a prominent Mormon and anti-communist, provides a link to W. Cleon Skousen.
The George Wallace campaigns for president are inexorable from the swamp from which Alex's worldview emerged.
It takes some brass balls for him to pretend that pretty much everyone was for Eisenhower calling in the National Guard when almost literally everyone he admires and considers a hero of modern history actively fought against that.
And for the man who wanted to do the opposite, which again, I should remind you, is keeping black kids out of school.
He believes everything about global conspiracy and all this shit because of the writings of Gary Allen and W. Cleon Scouser.
There is no part of what he believes about the world that isn't in some way very closely related to George Wallace's campaign that also is connected to all kinds of other horrible shit.
In September 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills that were aimed at adjusting how children were treated by the courts.
One of them, Senate Bill 439, made it so, except in cases of murder or rape, people younger than 12 cannot be prosecuted in court.
They're still obviously subject to some kind of process, whether it's child welfare reviews or psychiatric screenings.
It's just that the state recognizes that it's probably not cool to treat an 11-year-old like they're old enough to be exposed to a criminal justice system.
The second bill, Senate Bill 1391, makes it so you can't try someone younger than 16 as an adult.
They would still be tried for their crimes, but they would be sent to a juvenile facility instead of an adult prison if convicted.
The juvenile justice system already has mechanisms in place to hold someone after they turn 18 if the circumstances require it.
So it's not like these offenders would just be getting a free pass if they commit a crime at 17 or whatever.
This is what Alex has turned into a narrative that you can't arrest minors in California.
I think it might be fair to say that in addition to lying, Alex is also being kind of a racist here.
According to an article in the Sacramento B, Jerry Brown said it was a hard choice to sign this bill, but he was swayed to sign the bill based on, quote, stark racial and geographic disparity in how young men and women are treated who have committed similar crimes.
Part of what these bills aim to do is to work against a trend of criminalizing behaviors in young non-white people whose actions you might call precocious or a mistake were they white.
This is part of the conversation surrounding these bills.
So assuming Alex knows anything about the subject he's talking about, he should know that.
And he's staunchly opposed to the bills and is trying to encourage his audience to hate the bills by lying about what they do.
What I'm saying is ultimately he either has no idea what he's talking about or he does and he's lying about bills meant to make the juvenile justice system more fair and equitable.
And it's because if you start pulling that thread, then you go all the way back and you're like the very beginning of the criminal justice system is purely discriminatory.
He believes that there was a source that he was aware of and he knows about that said that 3 billion people in the world are suffering from iodine deficiency.
Sure.
Now, he can only find, he can't find that source anymore.
The UN says have iodine deficiency and have had mental disabilities from it.
But the latest numbers I've got from the National Institute of Health, because Wikipedia has changed this entry and removed it probably because we were talking about it.
This says the IDD is concerned a public health problem worldwide affecting all groups of people.
of which children and lactating women are the most vulnerable categories.
At a global scale, approximately 2 billion people suffer iodine deficiency, of which approximately 50 million present the clinical manifestations in daily food intake.
And I'm going to go into the Wikipedia entries and see who removes that because it had links to government reports saying 3.2 billion.
And I know we even did shows on that about a month ago and showed it.
So I'll go into the Wikipedia entries.
But this is so important, I should just go off air.
First, I love the idea of Alex pulling out like a Sherlock Holmes pipe and playing detective, poring through the edits on Wikipedia to see who took down his 3 billion statistic.
I have no idea what he's talking about.
And honestly, it's totally possible he's just misremembering something he read on Wikipedia or that he's embellished the number to begin with or it's an out-of-date source or something because there's a lot of progress that's been made globally in terms of iodine deficiency.
Alex is absolutely correct that there are serious problems that come from iodine deficiency, including physical and mental disabilities.
And that, according to a recent report from UNICEF, the number of people suffering from iodine-related things, it is probably close to about 2 billion worldwide.
However, it's important to understand where these 2 billion people are.
People suffering from iodine deficiency are almost exclusively in the developing world.
Countries that practice salt iodization eliminate almost all iodine deficiency.
And between 1990 and 2000, quote, 34 countries achieved the elimination of iodine deficiency through universal salt iodization.
This is a very effective solution to the problem.
And generally, the countries where this is the biggest issue are countries that have economic barriers to importing iodized salt or with producing it domestically.
Or there's another issue like they're war-torn to the point where implementing these sorts of programs is just unviable.
It's a difficulty, but it's a problem that many good people, including the UN, are working towards solving.
Vast numbers of people with iodine deficiency or who are at an increased risk for it are in India, Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
According to the CDC, quote, iodine deficiency disorders as goiter, cretinism, stillbirth, spontaneous abortion, and retarded physical and intellectual development have been virtually eliminated through the iodization of salt.
This is important because Alex is only talking about any of this because he's trying to sell his iodine pills.
And the way he's trying to pretend that they're important is by citing the statistic that 2 billion people worldwide are iodine deficient.
But the thing is, the people who are iodine deficient are almost entirely not a part of the market that Alex is selling to.
He's trying to take a very serious issue that people in developing countries are struggling with and that the UN is working to resolve.
And he's using it as a prop to try and convince his audience that maybe there's something wrong with them that iodine pills can solve.
This is super abusive marketing.
There is a slight decrease in iodine intake in the United States population that experts and people who look into this stuff have noted, but that's kind of a part, it's probably due to the sea salt trend.
Sea salt doesn't generally contain iodine, so people who are using mostly sea salt, they're not taking in as much iodine as they would if they just used table salt, and they should be doing that.
Also, certain diets have increased in popularity recently, like veganism, and those also increase your risk for decreased iodine intake based on the things that would be part of your diet.
I find it unlikely, though, there are many vegans in Alex's audience.
So when he comes back, Alex comes back from that break and he does allow Liberal to talk.
The caller, he lays out his point, which I think could be summed up as saying that there's a reason that there's a tension between Muslims and Christians, and that reason is propaganda.
And Alex has a responsibility to his audience to do a better job covering the topic.
Alex admits that there are good Muslims, but there's also political Islam that's evil.
And so he decides that what he's going to do is he's going to get up from the desk and go to a big map and he's going to show the spread of Islam on the map.
Whatever your opinion on Trump ordering the speaking of Solomoni, I think we can all agree that the most cringe thing to come out of it was the avalanche of Normi Tia World War III memes.
When Alex gets back, he tries to claim that Liberal's point was that Alex is pretending that Islam is expansionist, but it's really Christianity that's expanding, which wasn't what Liberal was saying at all.
I suspect that this is one part, Alex, just trying to save face about that blowup we just listened to, and another part of him having no ability to synthesize information that people are giving to him.
It is funny that he exemplifies why white American men shouldn't be allowed to do something while at the same time telling people why the Islamic nation shouldn't be allowed to do something.
These are the things, too, that really are important to understand.
Like when Alex screams about Islam and like grooming gangs in the UK and stuff like that, you can deconstruct that and you can talk about why he's wrong about these things.
And that's important.
But I think more important is understanding that him seeing Muslims in public in places that are indicative of integration.
Like you said, being at the mall, being at a pool supply shop, enjoying a nice hamburger meal.
Those are the sorts of things that drive him crazy and lead to this sort of an outburst.
It's the proof of integration.
It's the proof of coexistence that infuriate him because maybe those are indications that we can get along.
That everybody can just be fine with each other.
And he can't handle that because he wants a holy war.
There was a bit of a joke-running joke throughout it that every time Polster was on, like his name would come up on the screen, he would be a different enthusiast.