Today, Dan and Jordan continue tracking the modern day adventures of Alex Jones. In this installment, Alex gets really mad that one of his employees used 311 as intro music, dips his toe back into Seth Rich conspiracies, and confesses to multiple brutal murders.
If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoy this show, I'd like to support what these gents do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show.
Also, I gotta give a thank you to a listener who reached out to me because they gave me a little bit of a correction.
Or at least pointed something out that I got wrong, and I need to make a little correction about our last episode.
So on our last episode, I responded to Mike Adams citing a stat from Neil Ferguson about the coronavirus outbreak, and I made an incorrect assumption.
Because there's someone named Neil Ferguson who's come on Alex's show a bit in the past and is from the UK who'd recently written an op-ed about the coronavirus, I assumed that that was the Neil Ferguson that Mike was referring to.
As this listener, ironically named Alex, pointed out, there is another Neil Ferguson, who is an actual public health expert from Imperial College London, and I apologize that I got that wrong.
So because I dismissed the claims that were made based on believing them to have come from a humanities professor, it's only right that I take a look at them now, given that they're supposedly coming from someone whose opinion is a little more valid on the subject.
A couple of important qualifications here are that Ferguson's number is an estimate, and in the interview where he expresses this estimate, he also says that they don't know enough to be sure.
Even if there are as many cases as he is estimating, he's also very specifically talking about people who come down with very mild forms of the virus, who may not even know they have it, and may not even be contagious.
In the interview, Ferguson doesn't get into the modeling too much or explain how his estimate was reached.
Also, notably, he's not freaked out about it, and it's almost a side thought in the conversation.
It's not even something that's nailed on too much, but it's the piece of the conversation that is taken and amplified all over the place.
Even if what Ferguson is estimating is accurate, which he's not even concretely saying, it doesn't justify the way Mike Adams was using that figure.
For instance, Mike took that 50,000 new infections number that Ferguson was estimating and he connected it with the 15% mortality rate from the Lancet study to say that China would be looking at 7,500 deaths a day.
The cases that were a part of Ferguson's estimate were largely very mild cases and not the ones that would lead to deaths, whereas the Lancet study was a breakdown of 41 patients who presented already having pneumonia.
Those are the severe cases, and it's an inappropriate use of these statistics.
In another article from February 10th in The Telegraph, Ferguson said, Our estimates, while subject to much uncertainty due to the limited data currently available, suggest that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the 20th century, which is to say swine flu.
Yeah, that's to say that it is a serious public health issue, but it's not an apocalyptic event, the way Mike Adams is trying to use Ferguson's estimates to suggest.
I'm going to start the show at the beginning of the next segment.
It's a new pastime, a new thing we do here.
Not starting the show.
I'm not ready to start the show.
And that's just the way it is.
I've got a little OCD over the years, and if the broadcast starts with music that sounds like we're sitting back drinking pina coladas and just woke up in the Garden of Eden before the serpent, well, it just makes me not feel like I'm in the middle of a total fight for the complete future of human civilization.
One, Alex is obsessed with the virus because he's seeing a drastic increase in his sales.
He's already said that his immune gargles sold out, and if you go to MyPatriotSupplies website, they're saying they have a 12 times increased order volume.
Now, naturally, not all of those sales are coming through Alex, since they also sponsor pretty much all of the big right-wing alarmists, including Glenn Beck, but it's clear that Alex's share of the sales are rising.
Two, any government that decides to enact martial law probably doesn't care too much about there being a precedent.
That's kind of silly.
Also, this fails to take into account the quarantining cities already has a long precedent.
In 2014, the city of Yumen in China was put into lockdown after a man there died of the bubonic plague.
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, while they didn't quarantine a whole city, Canada quarantined over 30,000 people in Toronto, even though they only had 250 probable cases of the virus.
The experts don't believe that strict and enforced large-scale quarantines are the best way to deal with outbreaks, but also they really can't stop a country from doing them.
If there were some international ban on quarantining, Alex would claim that it was the globalist infringing on a country's sovereign right to lock down a city if they wanted to.
So there are international health regulations that countries have agreed to, but the issue is that they are not enforceable.
So the third thing, third point about that clip.
Is that there's no evidence I can find that the video involving the alleged woman who'd been shot at a checkpoint has been verified.
This is just something that Alex saw that someone had tweeted, and I have no idea if it's real or current.
I don't know what the truth is there, and neither does Alex.
He's assuming that it's real without any confirmation or journalistic due diligence.
And to the larger point...
People are not applauding China for instituting a quarantine and all these brutal crackdowns.
And actually, what they're doing is likely a part of a complicated balancing act.
Because those international health regulations are not enforceable, they're completely up to each country to abide by them willingly.
If a country doesn't cooperate in a crisis, that crisis is going to be impossible to deal with, and that affects the whole world.
So while there is growing evidence of a lack of transparency on China's part, potentially, and of course there are definite questions about whether or not the quarantining of millions of people is a great idea, the praise that people, like the head of the World Health Organization, are expressing are not about those issues.
We're in a public health emergency, just broadly speaking, and successful navigation of that emergency depends on China's cooperation.
Vox interviewed a couple experts about this, and I think that their perspective is helpful in understanding some of these public statements that people have been making.
For one, it's very important that China identified and sent out the genome of this virus in prompt fashion.
Devi Sridhar, the chair of the Global Public Health University of Edinburgh, told Vox, quote, the World Health Organization has a difficult balancing act.
They have to somehow retain being the lead coordinator and director of international health work, and the trade-offs they are having to make are about the greater good.
Right now, the greater good is to create positive incentives for countries to collaborate with the World Health Organization, to share data, to let missions into China.
If that means publicly having to praise China, I understand it.
Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown, said, quote, If the World Health Organization criticizes China publicly, it's possible they can be less transparent, less cooperative.
If I was in Tedros, the head of the World Health Organization, if I was in his shoes, I'm not entirely sure I would do anything differently.
This is a really complicated kind of thing, and the reality is that these international health regulations are great, and people agree to them after outbreaks are resolved.
And then they're pretty quickly ignored whenever a new one pops up.
For instance, restricting entry of people from affected areas is counter to those regulations.
But every time there's a public health event, countries are quick to breach this norm.
Mark Eccleston Turner, a global health law professor at Keele University in England, told Vox, quote, The international health regulation operates on mutual trust, largely.
And it is a mutual trust.
That mutual trust has been eroded over a number of outbreaks where member states have ignored the recommendations from the World Health Organization.
I think it's possible that we have at times painted too rosy a picture of the coronavirus situation, but that's just because I'm responding to the claims that Alex makes, which are sensationalist trash.
When you're dealing with a guy who's saying garbage like, It's over for humanity.
And you pair that with embarrassing sales tactics, I have no qualms about saying that it's just trash and garbage.
That said, it's important to recognize that serious people do have some critiques about China's handling of the outbreak.
They just don't match up with what Alex is saying.
And so when you hear people like the heads of the World Health Organization saying, like, we applaud China and something, there is a dynamic of, there are things to applaud, and it's not wrong to point those things out.
And if you don't do that, you have a state that has the ability to stop cooperating, and you run the risk of making everything worse for the world.
All of these issues are best to be dealt with after the immediacy of the situation is handled.
But the optics of this are perfect because Alex can say that the World Health Organization and these leaders are applauding China and pretend that what they're applauding is all of the meme videos that he's seen and all of the harsh, the crackdown of the quarantine.
And that's just not fair.
Alex is playing with optics in a way that's, I mean, just deceitful.
So, Alex gets back from break, and he starts the real show.
And on the beginning of the real show, he's talking about some issues, and one of them, it turns out, is Rush Limbaugh, who has come down with some cancer and got a Medal of Freedom.
I gotta tell you, we will probably get a lot of stations when Rush Limbaugh makes the jump into hyperspace.
And I do not have a good feeling about that.
But Rush has pretty much said it looks like he's terminal.
He might be able to stall it a while.
We hope he has a miracle.
And I sure as hell don't like the omen of Rush Limbaugh dying right before the 2020 election because he definitely helped Trump get elected the big way.
Let me just, in the time I left this segment, tell you what I'm going to get to today.
First up...
We have the quarantine center set up at U.S. military bases, DOD reports.
That's Miami Herald.
We broke this almost two weeks ago, and I said they were establishing these, and specifically where they were doing it, and of course we've got to call fake news, but we have that directly from White House sources.
So this Miami Herald article is just about the Department of Defense entering into an agreement at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services to provide quarantine space in case there are a need for additional beds for suspected coronavirus patients.
What this comes down to is the fact that the bases are equipped to handle this kind of thing, and they're located in places where they can be helpful.
The bases that agreed to assist are specifically ones that are near major airports.
So flights entering the United States from areas affected by the outbreak disembark, they have screening measures done to the passengers, and then suspected cases can be taken to the centers at the DOD bases.
The article is very clear that this is still a Department of Health and Human Services operation, just using space at these bases instead of creating new facilities that they don't need to create, with the Pentagon spokesman saying, quote, DOD personnel will not be in direct contact with the evacuees and will minimize contact with personnel supporting the evacuees.
So how it works is that the medical staff will attend to them, and if anyone tests positive for coronavirus, they'll then be relocated to a nearby hospital.
This is also a very limited arrangement.
The help agreement only lasts until February 22nd.
The likely reason for this arrangement being struck is because earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order that restricted travel from China, but it didn't completely shut it down.
According to the Charlotte Observer, starting February 2nd, flights from China to the United States were being directed to specific airports where the passengers could be best screened.
It makes sense that the Department of Health and Human Services would make use of the resources available to them, and if possible, borrow space from the DOD to house any possible suspected cases that might pop up.
Well, maybe they have to switch around and all the soldiers have to go to the Department of Human Health Services and all the patients and hospital staff have to go to the bases.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews suggests Bernie Sanders could assassinate political opponents of president.
Hillary has a bunch of people around her dead in incredibly suspicious circumstances.
Air Force coroners say that Ron Brown was shot through the head.
If you read that on the air, they say it's a conspiracy theory when it's a public fact.
They had a coroner in Arkansas called Femi Malik that would rule that people were found with their arms, legs, and heads cut off in plastic bags in a dump.
And they said the person committed suicide multiple times.
It's pretty fun that Alex is doubling down on Chris Matthews suggesting Bernie will kill political opponents based on nothing, and at the same time celebrating Trump firing people who testified against him in clear acts of retaliation for them testifying.
So, before we get into any of this, just off the top, this is all just a part of that dumb Clinton body bag shit that was started by the Waco conspiracy theorist named Linda Thompson back in the 90s as a way to attack Bill Clinton.
People have gone over this list of people who were quote-unquote close to the Clintons who died, and none of them really stand up to scrutiny at all.
Interestingly, though, Linda Thompson appeared as a guest on Bill Cooper's show The Hour of the Time 15 times.
Ron Brown was the first African-American to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and then when Clinton was elected, Brown became the first African-American to serve as Secretary of Commerce.
On April 3rd, 1996, he was one of 35 people who were tragically killed in a plane crash over Croatia.
And based on a small detail in the coroner's report, conspiracy theorists started spreading all this shit about his death.
An x-ray showed what appeared to be a small round wound, which folks decided must be a bullet hole.
This theory is super weak, considering that the x-ray suspiciously did not also include a bullet.
Any bone fragments or an exit wound, which makes it super unlikely that he was shot.
There's so much more that needs to be explained for this to be plausibly presented as a murder, and neither Alex nor any of the Clinton conspiracy crowd has ever provided anything close to an explanation for how they think this went down.
Like, let's say he was shot before...
They just dragged him on the plane and everyone got on the plane with a dead body?
Obviously, the way this goes down is a D.B. Cooper style fucking hijacking the CIA agent or NSA agent or whatever you want.
Breaks into the plane, sets it down, kills the pilot, says, we're all going down, then walks into the fuselage, shoots the guy, and then jumps out the side and parachutes out.
So as for Fami Malek, what Alex is referring to here is the case of Don Henry and Kevin Ives.
I have no idea what he's talking about with suicide and people in bags and all that stuff, but he's clearly talking about these two guys.
Henry and Ives, aged 16 and 17 respectively, were hit by the 425 AM train on August 23, 1987, as they lay on the tracks.
They'd been out hunting and had some weed in their system, which may have led to the coroner, Fami Malek, to conclude that they were passed out from the weed and got hit by a train, having fallen asleep on the tracks.
The families did not accept that determination, so they got a second opinion, and the information that came up made it seem very clear that these kids were murdered.
For instance, they found a stab wound in one of their backs, and the second coroner found that they had way less weed in them than Malik had suggested.
From here, all sorts of conspiracies started swirling around about how these kids must have accidentally seen something they shouldn't have, like a drug deal that would implicate then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton.
None of this has ever been proven, but it's accepted as truth by the Clinton conspiracy crowd.
There was the 1989 case of Olivia Ward, which he determined to be a murder, but further examination found to be inconclusive, with no evidence of murder at all.
It's not like he always bungled cases, but the case of Henry and Ives was definitely not an isolated incident in his tenure at the coroner's office.
And the other cases he made mistakes in don't seem to have any relation to the Clintons, nor does Henry and Ives' unless you are operating off guesses and theories that aren't substantiated.
So Alex has these two examples of Clinton murders that he throws out, pretending that they're solidly proven, but they're absolutely not.
This is all just dumb old right-wing conspiracy shit.
And more to the point, even if Hillary killed every person she's ever met in her life, that has nothing to do with Bernie, who, if you've forgotten, Hillary hates.
So I thought that this is just going to be a Chris Matthews talks about Bernie killing people and then Alex gets to go off on a Clinton conspiracy jag.
So this is a story that Alex is covering about, you know, like One American News Network is putting this out, so Alex is covering that.
It's about a couple of emails that turned up in a FOIA request for all the emails between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
There were a couple emails regarding Seth Rich, but it's pretty important to recognize the context of these interactions and these emails.
Seth Rich died on July 10th, 2016, and these emails are from August 10th, 2016.
They're not really about Seth Rich or any investigation of his death.
It's very clear from the first email in the chain that this was specifically about claims that Julian Assange had been making really vaguely in the media that Seth Rich was the source of the emails that WikiLeaks published.
This email, the initial one, is from the Public Affairs Office, or the Media Relations section of the FBI, asking some folks if the FBI had any involvement in this.
There are a lot of parts retracted for who knows what reason, but the exchange, as it appears, seems to be them saying that there is no FBI involvement.
The emails got caught up in this FOIA request because Strzok ended up forwarding the email to Paige, who was an FBI lawyer, looping her in on the situation in case there's any legal implications.
None of this seems very suspicious at all, unless you already believe that Hillary had Seth Rich killed, and you let your imagination run wild about the parts that are redacted.
I'm very much unimpressed with this development in the case of this evidence, and I think it demonstrates literally nothing.
But I am very, very worried for Alex's legal situation.
But, you know, the data via some of these suits that actually went the other way came out.
And it's come out in federal court that the download information on the HackDNC servers, because you can look on the files and see how it was downloaded, at the time it happened, was six times faster than any streaming service capability in the world.
The people who are getting sued for spreading misinformation about Seth Rich are not getting sued by the DNC or Hillary Clinton.
They're getting sued by Seth Rich's parents, who have been very clear in the past that they're being re-traumatized by having their son's tragic death being used for political propaganda.
There aren't a hundred suits about this.
Alex is making that up to seem like the DNC and Hillary are desperate to do a cover-up, when in reality it's just a family fighting back against people who have caused them harm.
Also, that stuff that Alex is saying about the download speeds being too fast to be a hack didn't come out in court.
That stuff that past Infowars guest William Binney had claimed, which was used to give credibility to the narrative that Russian intelligence couldn't have been behind the hack, and in fact, it had to be an inside job.
Because the speeds were so quick, it had to be a USB.
That was used to get these files could not have been done by a download.
So the first problem was that this claim that the speed at which the files were downloaded was 22.7 megabytes per second, exceeded available internet download speeds.
Just based on that little bit of information, this theory is shaky at best.
As it turns out, Benny wasn't working from any real analysis of his own.
He was just using information he'd received from a man named Adam Carter, who is allegedly a researcher and tech expert.
As it turns out, Adam Carter's real name was Tim Leonard, and he was less an expert as he was a 39-year-old troll from the United Kingdom with a bit of a track record of spreading misinformation on Reddit and 4chan, most of it having to do with how Russia didn't hack the DNC.
This shell game of fake identities was tracked down by info security researcher and expert Duncan Campbell, and this led to some interesting consequences.
Under his Adam Carter alias, Leonard operated a website called G-2 that sought to show that Guccifer 2.0 couldn't have been Russian intelligence.
Through this site, Leonard sent William Binney a file that claimed to show that the hack was an inside job.
I'll read to you here from Duncan Campbell's piece about his research that was published in Computer Weekly.
The untitled file included complex details explaining how to unlock information inside a tranche of files released by Goose for 2.0 in London.
Metadata in the files had been manipulated to prove that the documents could have been stolen only by a Democratic National Committee employee.
This file that was sent to Benny had manipulated metadata, which made it appear that the download was impossible, except locally.
Binnie did no analysis on the files himself, but instead took this information and took it as gospel.
The work into this file was attributed to Leonard's other alias, Forensicator, and from there was, I guess, just deemed credible by Binnie without further question.
Binnie began making the rounds on right-wing media, offering this smoking gun that it wasn't Russian hacking.
His claims were all over Breitbart, Hannity, and of course he showed up a bunch on Infowars.
His claims even made it all the way to Trump.
Who told then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to meet with Benny to get information that would prove that Russia didn't hack the DNC.
And that makes this very sad, especially considering the next development.
Duncan Campbell was able to get William Binney to visit Britain and analyze the actual data contained in the actual Guccifer files, and, quote, a month after visiting CIA headquarters, Binney came to Britain.
After reexamining the data in the Guccifer 2.0 files thoroughly with the author of this article, Binney changed his mind.
He said there was, quote, no evidence to prove where the download copy was done.
The Gooseford 2.0 files analyzed by Leonard's G2 space were, quote, manipulated, he said, and a, quote, fabrication.
Even William Binney has come out and admitted that the basis for his claims about download speeds and how it's impossible that the hack wasn't an in-house operation was bullshit and a fabrication.
There's nothing here other than a supposed expert getting tricked by a troll and in the process tricking the fucking president.
Alex is lying, saying that the information came out in court when in reality it was bullshit that he unquestioningly accepted from William Binney, who had unquestioningly accepted it from Leonard.
Alex is reopening his interest into Seth Rich, which is a really bad idea, and defending that decision based on lies about things his sources don't even still believe.
If Duncan Campbell had still gone through the process that he did of figuring all this stuff out and convinced William Binney to come do the work over with him, I imagine that Binney would have been like, yeah, you know what?
We have sold out of the 16-ounce immune gargle that has the nanosilver that's patented and documented and even admitted in documents we've shown to go after this whole Corona-SARS family of viruses.
I can't let people manipulate my feelings cold-bloodedly.
And that's where this comes in.
People that are good and strong have to do the right thing when it comes down to it.
Even though we don't...
Let me tell you something.
When I fry some enemy and defeat them, I don't even feel good.
I'm like, I can't believe I had to spend time on that person, man.
And I feel bad that they, like when I see how bad they are and how weak they are and how bad their family is, I'm not like, like a lot of people I know go around poor people.
They can be poor black people, poor white people, poor whatever.
And they like feel elitist.
Man, did you see those poor dumbass people?
Man, we're not like them.
And I'm like, really?
You feel good?
Because they're doing bad?
Worst job I ever had.
I was like, what's the highest job I can get was a carpet cleaner.
It was Stanley Steamer Carpet Cleaner like 30 years ago.
And all they're doing is taking care of people that have actually got their arms and legs blown off, and nobody in the military will deny those are the real heroes.
But think about paramedics.
Or even police that have got to show up and see these chewed up bodies.
Or you drive by a wreck, you don't know the firefighters and police are there with dead kids and stuff.
Imagine being the first cop to pull up after a wreck and there's a three-year-old with blood spurting out begging for mommy and you're trying to save him and you can't and little baby dies.
It doesn't even matter.
You knew, well, that's not my fault.
I got there.
I tried to hold it around their neck.
I tried to put a little baby.
It's a psychic wound.
And then there's everybody else that just wants to go home and watch Netflix.
And, you know, here's some stuff from Jeff Bezos from Black Lives Matter.
Let's kill the cops.
And you're just like, it doesn't even fit.
And you've got these billionaires sitting up there, funding Bernie Sanders, by the way.
That is a white nationalist meme talking point that spread to deflect blame from the guy who hit her with his car.
The fact that Alex consistently brings that up isn't necessarily proof that he's intentionally running interference for white supremacists, but it's definitely a telling marker as to the sources of information he deems credible.
He has to be getting it through that channel, and he's either winkingly and knowingly repeating it, or he just thinks that those people know what's up.
So a 27-year-old man did run his car into a GOP voter registration tent set up on Saturday, and that's awful.
Even though these incidents may seem similar to Alex in that they both involve cars, when they're viewed together, they actually demonstrate clearly why the national conversation happened after the Unite the Right rally, and this one will not have the same effect.
The first obvious thing is that at the Unite the Right rally, Heather Heyer was killed.
Fatalities will always increase the severity of a situation.
Conversely, in the case of this guy in Florida, no injuries were even reported, which makes his actions stupid and wrong, but it's clearly not as huge a deal as if he'd murdered somebody.
Second, while it appears that the guy in Florida didn't like Trump supporters, Lieutenant Larry Gale of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said that, quote, we don't know if this is politically motivated.
You can make the assumption that it's politically motivated, and you're welcome to have that opinion, but the people investigating it don't know that yet, so it remains to be seen officially.
Conversely, at the Unite the Right rally, the political motives of the events that led to the car attack were pretty well understood.
And then finally, you have this very basic aspect.
Everyone knows that driving your car into people is wrong.
The left and right agree on that, or as they should.
So what was particularly unsettling for people about the Unite the Right rally was Trump's response to the fallout of it when he said that there were very fine people on both sides.
To be fair to Trump, he also said, quote, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.
But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
So, I mean, we finally have a president who will recognize the inherent decency of people who are willing to march alongside open white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
So, I don't know if that quote actually makes things any better.
Everybody's all talking about the bad people, but don't you want to shed a tear for the people who just wanted to oppress other people and not kill anybody?
So instead of reacting unequivocally after the rally, Trump tried to defend his side.
Instead of respecting that a woman had been killed and that goddamn neo-Nazis were marching alongside his supporters and recognizing that there was a real problem there, he decided to provide cover and defense for them, which most people found shocking and really disgusting.
There wasn't a defense of this guy's actions, no call to consider, well, hey, you know Trump's policies are pretty shitty and his supporters are defending a guy who's hurting a lot of people.
There wasn't an attempt to justify a clearly wrong act by deflecting, which is the right thing to do.
This guy's actions are not indicative of the Democratic Party, they are just his bad actions.
The actions of white supremacist terrorists would not be associated with Trump if he behaved differently in crucial situations, like the press conference after the Unite the Right rally.
Because we all agree that running your car into people is wrong, and in this case no one is trying to pretend that the conversation is about anything other than that, we all get to move forward after the agreement.
He's been arrested.
He will be treated as appropriate by the law.
There's no need to ask what the fuck is wrong with people trying to justify unjustifiable things.
And this is largely why this is just a bad thing that happened in Florida that even people like Alex will probably not remember in a week, as opposed to a deeply traumatic event, the ripples of which are still resonating to this day.
It's so fucking obvious, but Alex needs to ramp up the conservative victimhood juice.
That's so important to animating the rhetoric and the narratives that he puts forth on his show.
What's disgusting to me about that is that it feels so often like when some kind of tragedy happens due to a white nationalist terror attack, the right is not at all interested in engaging with that.
They're just excited and hoping that there will be a whatabout either later or that they can point to.
They want a whatabout more than they want a resolution to anything.
So there was a story in late January of a construction worker in Florida who was accused of murdering his boss, who loved Trump, but he didn't use a hammer.
He used a trowel.
Apparently, the two men got into a political argument, and then the dude killed his boss before draping an American flag on him.
The problem here is that Alex hears that this guy killed his Trump-loving boss after a political argument, and he just assumes that the murderer is a Democrat who hates Trump.
In reality, the alleged murderer is one of those anti-government types who believes that the government is out to get him.
So on the Situation Room on June 14, 2017, while reporting on the shooting at the congressional baseball practice, Wolf Blitzer played a piece that was compiled by CNN's congressional correspondent, Phil Mattingly.
Approximately seven seconds of the piece was an acquaintance of the shooter saying, quote, I just want to let people know that he wasn't evil, that he was, I guess, tired of some of the politics that are going on.
Wolfe didn't say that it was good, and in fact, after Mattingly finished up his presentation of his piece, here's what Wolfe actually said.
unidentified
You know, it's interesting, Phil, because clearly he was evil.
And on March 22nd, as you point out, he posted this on Facebook.
Trump is a traitor.
Trump has destroyed our democracy.
It's time to destroy Trump and company.
And then he said Republicans are the Taliban of the USA.
When you say on a Facebook post it's time to destroy Trump and company, that's a threat against the president of the United States, and that's a crime.
Not only did Wolf not support the shooter's actions, he directly and clearly rejected the statement the acquaintance made saying that the shooter wasn't evil.
Kind of seems like Alex just makes up whatever he wants in order to satisfy the right wing's constant need to portray themselves as victims.
You know what's really fucked up about that clip is like in the past, whenever he's talked about like these probable technical murders that he's committed are always in the context of Hey, I didn't like to do it.
I was getting bullied.
It's almost self-defense in nature.
This is not.
He's sitting there relishing the slowness of their death.
I decided to cut this clip, though, because it really illustrates how Alex is just making up the bullshit he says in his ramblings.
For one, in 1988, Anderson Cooper's brother, Carter, committed suicide by jumping out of a window.
This is absolutely tragic, and their mother believes that this was the result of a psychotic episode caused by bad drug interaction, but Alex is rewriting it, which is a fucking gross thing to do.
Yeah.
unidentified
Regardless, Anderson Cooper does not just have one sibling.
And that's not even considering that Gloria Vanderbilt had a sister, Kathleen Vanderbilt, or the fact that Cornelius Vanderbilt was their great-great-grandfather, and he had 13 children.
The family is very diffused now, and there are a ton of living Vanderbilts, like guess who?
Timothy Oliphant, who is Anderson Cooper's third cousin once removed.
Alex is making up that Anderson Cooper is the last Vanderbilt to make him seem like more of a villain and as an opportunity to mock him for his brother's death.
Because Alex is a profoundly bad person.
And also, it turns out he probably killed a lot of people.
This is pretty sad, but I'm not going to get too invested in it because, like I said, I have little faith that he's going to see the inside of a prison cell.
We've now confirmed from major food suppliers across the United States that they've already run out of supplies of storeable foods because of institutional and governmental buyers.
That's right.
The rich, the powerful, the elite, big corporations are now buying up food stores at alarming rates.
So I've been meaning to get into this for a while, but I keep forgetting.
So now's a good time.
The main driver of the sales pitch that Alex is going with here regarding the survival food from My Patriot Supply is that bulk buyers are coming in and buying up all the survival food on the market, so you need to act now to get your food so your family doesn't starve.
It's a pretty exploitative and gross marketing scheme, but what if I were to tell you, Jordan, that I've seen this exact same marketing campaign before?
As we discussed when we went over this, Frank Bates is a fake character designed to appeal to paranoid conservative radio listeners.
He was the creation of an affiliate marketing scam artist named Alan Baller, who ran a company called Reboot Marketing.
Under the umbrella of Reboot Marketing, Baller had a ton of little smaller grifts, and one of them was Food for Patriots.
In 2013, Food for Patriots was selling survival food by warning their customers that FEMA was trying to buy up all the food, trying to secure 420 million meals to feed people in their FEMA camps.
FEMA was buying up all the other available food, but you could still get food from Food for Patriots, because unlike other companies, they weren't sellouts to the man.
This dude, Alan Baller, made a shit ton of money playing on the fears of scared conservative audiences of people who'd been trained to think that any day Obama was going to put them in a FEMA camp, in part thanks to the fake persona of Frank Bates, who was a guy just like them who had a hot tip.
Alex is doing the same thing now, and based on the fact that Alex used to air weird device commercials, I wouldn't be surprised if he also advertised Food for Patriots.
Except I'm certain that he didn't.
Because Food for Patriots wasn't a real company.
It was just Alan Baylor reselling food from My Patriot Supply at a markup.
Because Alex's show, and basically the entirety of right-wing media, is predicated on amplifying manufactured fear to distract from the very real problems that they're making worse, there will always be some sort of an issue to make profitable.
Sometimes it's a black president you're sure is going to lock you in a FEMA camp.
Sometimes it's a public health crisis.
But no matter the exact character of the thing you're supposed to be afraid of, if you listen to Alex, rest assured that it will be used to sell you bullshit.
And my patriot supply is going to be there, happily taking a cut.
Alan Baylor was laughing.
And you have to be a complete idiot to think that Alex isn't on some level laughing at the people who think he's sincere too.
Yeah, and even worse is that if you can't counteract an emotion like fear...
With rational thought, you think, well, maybe you try and use a different emotion to counteract it, and then you have no fucking clue how that's going to go down.
Nobody knows what happens whenever you start amping people up in all directions.
To say, what if this whole coronavirus in China is just a ruse, just to mask massive amounts of people movements?
So they get all these people inside these buildings, then they go into the deep tunnel systems and move all these large, huge quantities of people wherever it is that they want, preparing for a possible ground invasion, per se.
Sir, you know, mainstream media tells us don't speculate.
In a world of constant lies and disinfo and the whole history of governments staging lies and huge hoaxes, you'd be crazy not to say that anything's possible.
I wouldn't say that this guy can't sit around and think about how maybe this whole coronavirus situation is just to get millions of people into a big building so they can go through some underground tunnels so they can gain the element of surprise in a ground invasion of somewhere.
I think that's exactly the sort of thing that's appropriate for a conversation that involves a couple of dumb college students and a blunt.
It's just not a serious theory.
Everyone has the right to speculate, but that doesn't mean that all speculation should be respected and taken as equal.
Some speculation is really stupid, and just because Alex wants to pretend that there's moral virtue in his practice of not doing any work, that doesn't mean he needs to validate shit like that.
A couple points.
If this were the plan, I'm not sure where they would be ground invading.
Wuhan is pretty inland in China, so those would have to be...
Point is, Alex's own shit is so weak that he can't afford to even push back against the stupidest things his callers say for fear of accidentally training them to think critically.
If he helps them recognize why their own idea is bad, it's only a matter of time before they apply that to his bullshit, and the next thing you know, food bucket sales dry up, and you can't be having that.
In fact, I've been thinking about doing new shows, and I've had a bunch of ideas, but I can tell you.
I really think the answer is like two or three hours a day, commercial-free, if TV and radio stations want to pick it up, they can, of just phone calls.
So, I've made the point that Alex is like, the way he's selling this immune gargle and his toothpaste that has the silver in it is really, really inappropriate.
And the way he's been making health claims about it is really bad.
But now it's even branching out even further because now he's advising a caller to use it for protection against coronavirus.
unidentified
I did buy your immune gargle and toothpaste and all this stuff this week because I've got to go back to Taiwan tomorrow.
Yeah, and that's a correction that I need to make also, is that apparently, because he's making these claims in the speech form as opposed to the label on his bottle, it's more an issue with the Federal Trade Commission than it is with the FDA.
I got those mixed up a little bit in terms of what they monitor.
So, granted, I mean, he's making all these pretty outrageous commercials about the gargle, but we do know that Alex had his first fever in four years, and he took the gargle and it cured him.
He says move to a small town to survive the collapse.
And yes, if we don't turn America around and rout the leftist poison ideology that is designed...
To collapse society.
Then the producers, whether you be white, black, Hispanic, old, young, but people that want to live like normal humans and want to live in what America was, if you don't want to live in the globalist paradigm that's actually taking us backwards, we're going to have to move to geographic areas and then pass laws and have culture and systems that do not tolerate the left.
Because they don't tolerate us.
They come in and take over and then end fair elections.
I wonder if that's going to end up looking at all like a white ethnostate theocracy.
I wonder.
This isn't good, man.
Charles Murray is the author of the book The Bell Curve, which has been widely discredited, but yet lives on as one of the foundational texts among the race IQ people who like to argue that minorities are genetically less intelligent than white people.
But...
White people less intelligent than Ashkenazi Jews.
Charles Lane did a piece on the bell curve in the New York Review of Books and noted that it was weird how a number of the experts he cites in the book are explicit racists and Nazi sympathizers, less than they are respected experts in the field that the book is supposed to be covering.
It's a pretty well-explained thing that the bell curve is trash, and I would say that if you hear anyone citing it as a source or speaking well of Charles Murray, that's a red flag.
They might have some crypto positions they're trying to sneak into the conversation.
It seems like Alex might be into what this dude's got to say.
And now we've got to isolate.
We've got to move our conservative right-wing stuff into small areas and then take over.
If you have children, you have a duty to go to rural Christian areas and to raise them outside of the big cities in the suburbs.
It's not running to go to those places, but you have to be politically involved and fight for the rest of the nation and against the globalists while you're there.
But you need to run with your children to the most conservative, Christian, nationalist, patriot area you can.
And as California collapses, and our offices are here, there's no way I can move these offices.
But I certainly can move my children to a safer distance away from Sodom and Gomorrah, and then in the future telecommute in a lot of the time, because we have to put our money where our mouths are.
We're going to find out real quick the morbidity rate, and I hope it's super low.
In fact, I hope it's zero.
What are you predicting it's going to be?
unidentified
I'm hoping it's going to be low, but like my brother told me, I don't know where he got this from or thought of it, but he said, just remember, don't pop any bubble wrap because all that air comes from China.
The largest bubble wrap company in the world is Sealed Air Corporation, which was started by Alfred Fielding, who was an engineer who lived in New Jersey.
Their headquarters is currently in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I can find no evidence that their bubble wrap is primarily made in China.
Also, bubble wrap is sterile, the inside of it.
So much so that you can find a 2014 story from NPR about how researchers at Harvard found that they could use bubble wrap as a makeshift kind of test tube, which could have amazing applications for underfunded scientists, particularly in developing countries.
They wrote up their findings in the journal Analytical Chemistry and everything.
A follow-up study in the Biomedical Optics Express journal had this in its abstract.
Quote, in this paper, we demonstrate that the bubbles of bubble wrap make ideal trapping chambers for integration with low-cost optical manipulation.
The interior of the bubbles is sterile and gas permeable, allowing for the bubbles to be used to store and culture cells, while the flat side of the bubble wrap is of efficient optical quality to allow for optical trapping inside the bubbles.
If the interior of bubble wrap is sterile enough for scientists to use them to create lab cultures, I don't think this caller and his dumb brother need to be too worried about it.
But here, again, we have Alex responding to a caller making a very stupid point by saying it's a good point.
It's almost like he has a vested interest in validating and supporting really bad thinking in his audience.
We know that in the past, whenever Alex has gone on these large-scale narratives, like with the Boston bombing, in particular, at least in terms of the ones that we've seen and really focused on, and the Trump stuff, too, to an extent, we've seen evidence that his traffic was way up.
And now, as he embarks on this coronavirus shit, we see him experiencing the same thing.
Alex is still trying to create that appearance that the Boyle interview led to Trump's science advisor coming out, who I think he still thinks is Anthony Fauci, which is funny.
So, again, here's another example of Alex using the health claim.
About the silver in order to sell his toothpaste an immune gargle, which is not cool.
They're going to try to find somebody that's done something corrupt in their giant orbit, threaten them with prison if they don't say Trump laundered money or something.
That's one of my huge fucking annoyances, that the way it was portrayed so many times in so many different media outlets of, like, Trump defeats impeachment push, or Trump beats the impeachment, which is fucking bullshit.
Trump, what he did was everything possible to fuck up the defense that they put towards him.
Trump didn't beat shit.
Trump was protected by a corrupt fucking fascist organization.
So we got one last clip here, and Barnes is still there, but Alex goes to calls, and he takes a call from a guy who has some updates about the coronavirus.
unidentified
Sure.
The numbers of the coronavirus, they started reporting the cases that people have recovered, and so 3,669 people have been reported to recover from it.
910 people have died.
That comes out to be a 20% mortality rate.
Even the official numbers now show it has a much higher death rate.
That 20% figure comes from a study that looked at patients who had to be hospitalized because their cases were really severe, which includes only people who had had their condition progressed to the point of having pneumonia.
The number of people who have recovered from the disease is not an accurate picture of people who got a mild case and then just had some flu symptoms and got better.
It's specifically the number of people who were hospitalized for pneumonia from the coronavirus who recovered and left the hospital.
And honestly...
You know, even if you're talking about a 20% mortality rate for people in that subset of people who got the virus, that's not wildly out of sync with the general expectations you'd have for people who have cases of pneumonia generally.
According to Healthline, quote, the 30-day mortality rate for people with pneumonia is 5-10% of hospitalized patients.
They can be up to 30% in those admitted to intensive care.
Oftentimes, these numbers can sound really horrifying when they're presented out of context, like this caller is doing.
It's really irresponsible of Alex, and particularly Barnes, to frame it like this.
They need to be able to understand the statistics that they're talking about and discuss them appropriately, or else what they're doing is just ridiculous.
And that's what you see consistently throughout all of this.
Alex is taking information from callers and validating it.
He has no idea what this caller is talking about and being like, ha-ha, yes.