Today, Dan and Jordan discuss the stretch of time when Alex Jones should have just gone on vacation. In this installment, Alex claims that at least six sci-fi movies are real and interviews Ted Nugent's wife as an expert about coronavirus.
It's really heartfelt, and right now it is dealing with a narrative that is purely based on recovery from PTSD and finding yourself and doing all of these different things.
How he's dealing with it.
It's really, really good for right now, especially.
So I will take all those old sympathies that people sent me, and I'll apply them now, and I appreciate everyone's kind thoughts, because this shit sucks.
So, Jordan, I want to give a little bit of a preamble to this episode.
I believe that as this public health crisis continues and things get worse and a little bit more...
Frightening and uncertain, I wanted to take a moment to address something that I've been wrestling with a little bit.
It's a thought that's kind of natural to come up in these sorts of circumstances, and that is, was Alex Jones right?
It can be difficult because I think it's very important to recognize in situations like this that even when some of Alex's vague predictions come true, he's still wrong.
There's an important dynamic to consider, and that is that Alex is an alarmist by nature.
He has to elicit very intense emotions of fear and anxiety from his audience in order to keep them in the fold.
So every world event is presented with an amplified level of intrigue, usually by painting everything as a globalist plot against him or his friends.
In this case, his alarmism feels warranted, you know, because what we see Yeah, well, yeah, yeah.
Obviously, his show went way past the line in terms of being healthy alarmism, and it drifted deeply into Chicken Little, the sky is falling territory, which is the first major strike that I would have against him.
Alex's alarmism was also never pointed in any productive direction.
For instance, when he would talk about the low number of tests being done in the United States, his solution wasn't to push for increased testing.
He instead decided to yell about how he imagined the lack of testing was a globalist plot to embarrass Trump, and that it's actually good because Trump needs to keep the infection numbers artificially low to avoid a panic which would hurt him politically.
The point that the government was making, the point they were making of failing in terms of testing is a fair one, but the conclusion that Alex arrives to because of that is ludicrous.
There were various things that he said that you can't really dispute have come to pass, but it's important to recognize what sorts of things those are.
There are two major categories of, let's call them predictions, that appear to have come true.
The first is completely obvious byproducts of things getting worse with the virus.
In this category, you have predictions like the stock market is going to go down.
By the point this was a main talking point for Alex, the city of Wuhan was already under a lockdown, so even if things didn't spread much past that point, it's a pretty safe bet that there would be some economic implications.
This is not the sort of prediction that you could really give someone a ton of credit for, and it's also important to recognize how this prediction was used.
Right, right, right.
Further, the idea that the globalists released the virus to try to attack the stock market to embarrass Trump is used to justify Trump's involvement in the delayed and bad response to the outbreak.
Trump didn't put out adequate numbers of tests because he knew that the virus was just the globalists trying to tank the economy and he knew that if the real numbers were out there, the public would panic and the market would fall.
The not-all-that-impressive prediction that the market would be affected by an outbreak is ultimately repackaged into an imaginary motivation for the outbreak itself and then used to justify Trump's negligence in his response to it.
The other type of prediction that Alex is kind of right about is the things that he predicted which are actually the result of a negligent response.
One of the big early ones in this category is how Alex said that there would be an outbreak around Seattle, which did turn out to be correct.
This was a pessimistic prediction, but it wasn't an outlandish one given that there's already a confirmed case in the area.
If you're an alarmist, you will take that case and you will build on it, which is what Alex did.
It's important to recognize that Alex's behavior in this crisis isn't really all that out of the normal for him.
Back in 2014, he was saying that Obama was trying to bring Ebola into the country, but you forget about that hysteria because the situation was handled with appropriate intensity.
There was international cooperation and Obama took care of that shit.
Along with everybody else who was involved.
There are hundreds of examples like this, even outside the medical sphere.
Every time Alex yells at his audience after a shooting about all the guns being taken.
All the times he would prophesy a total collapse of the economy and a summer of rage back when he was primarily a gold pitch man.
or the many, many times Alex has said that the globalists are going to try to kill Trump within the next week.
Alex's business model largely relies on being wrong all the time, but insisting the audience forget about all those incorrect predictions and narratives and only focus on the stuff he was close to right about.
As the coronavirus situation gets worse, he's able to play the game where he can say that he was right and everyone called him wrong.
But it's important to recognize that even if he hits some of the points on this, he's still a liar and a fraud.
It's also crucial not to lose sight of the main elements of his conspiracy.
He believes that the Gates Foundation already has a treatment or vaccine for this, which is incorrect.
He's just lying about a group that the Gates have given some money to, the Pure Bright Institute, that has a patent for a completely unrelated coronavirus related to a vaccine for chickens.
He's asserted as fact that the virus is man-made, is tons of different viruses all lumped together, and has, quote, the HIV delivery system.
All of this is from a non-peer-reviewed study that was self-retracted by its authors after the methodology and conclusions began getting some review from their scientific peers, who found their work to be deeply flawed.
Alex still believes every exaggeration he's made about that study to be founded, proven, and true.
He believes without any evidence that the study was retracted because the authors were pressured by the globalists.
Alex has claimed that Lancet said the virus had a 15% mortality rate, which is not true.
The study only looked at a handful of patients who already had developed severe symptoms like pneumonia, and it's not something you can extrapolate to the general population.
Even Alex has explained that on air, indicating that he understands what the study was about, but he's not stopped from making the claim that Lancet said there was a 15% mortality rate.
That is him lying.
He believed and asserted his fact that the virus was stolen from a lab in Winnipeg, then sent to China.
This is not true.
So not true, in fact, that Alex later decided it was disinformation, since his dumb-dumb expert Francis Boyle came up with a better narrative.
That narrative was that the virus was created in a lab at UNC Chapel Hill.
This is not true.
This narrative was wholly based on the term gain-of-function, appearing in a study from UNC in 2015, as well as a recent study about the novel coronavirus.
The 2015 study had to do with a researcher giving a coronavirus a gain of function related to ACE2 cleavage.
Whereas the recent study was about the current virus, it was noting that the virus appeared to have a naturally occurring gain of function related to furin cleavage.
These are not the same thing at all, but a non-scientist had found the word gain of function in both studies, and that constitutes a closed case on Alex's show.
Alex has asserted it as fact, based on that study from 2015, that Obama sold the virus to China.
This is not true.
This is just a lie based on the fact that there was some Chinese funding that went into the study, which does not prove the sale of a virus.
And it can also be explained very easily.
Alex has asserted as fact, based on the headline that he found about that 2015 UNC study, that there was a big public debate about Obama selling the virus to China.
This was an article on the website The Scientist with the headline, quote, lab-made coronavirus triggers debate.
Alex has just decided that the debate the headlines referring to is whether or not Obama should have sold it to China, which is a complete fabrication.
He's just making that up.
It's a lie.
It's a very short article, and if you read it, it's clear that the debate is about whether gain-of-function studies themselves are ethical.
Alex has asserted as fact, and then walked back, and then re-embraced the idea that the coronavirus is a race-specific bioweapon targeting Asian military-aged men, possibly the deep state attacking China for fentanyl.
There are plenty more examples but these are the very foundational lies and misinterpretations Alex has used to build up his central conspiracy.
This isn't saying anything about the shit he's allowed his guests to do.
He let Steve Pachanek claim that he was the first person in the United States to get the virus and he cured himself with antibiotics, even though antibiotics don't treat viruses.
He let Mike Adams lie about how mosquitoes transmit disease.
He supported callers making claims ranging from the virus is meant to kill off everyone on Social Security to don't pop air bubbles because the air in there is from China and could be infected.
In high anxiety times, the work of alarmists and propagandists becomes more appealing, because we're all confused, and probably scared.
If you aren't paying close attention, the finer details of what Alex is doing fade into the background, and you just kind of remember him saying that the market was going to go down, and that martial law was going to come in.
Though there isn't really martial law at this point when we're recording, there are cities and states putting in place various quarantine measures, and it's hard not to feel like that's the same thing.
The issue, though, is that these things that Alex is right about were relatively avoidable consequences of decisions the president he supports made or failed to make.
If Obama had handled the Ebola outbreak in 2014 the way Trump has handled this outbreak, Alex probably would have looked a lot closer to right back then, too.
Anyway, my point is that whatever superficial things Alex has been kind of correct about are way, way overshadowed by the things he's been completely and glaringly wrong about, which happen to be the cornerstones of his conspiracy.
Anyway, I'm sorry about this big rant to begin the episode, but I really have this feeling of...
So, we start on the 19th, and it's actually kind of fitting, because Alex is going through his, you know, he really feels like he's proven that the Democrats and the left...
They're all cheering for the economy to collapse because they want to hurt Trump.
And when you recognize that that's kind of the foundation for his belief or his justification for claiming that the Democrats wanted to destroy the economy to attack Trump, which is why they'd release the virus, it's like, stop watching Bill Maher.
Hold on to that thought that Alex doesn't like QAnon for later.
Keep that in your back pocket.
So admittedly, I have no idea how long anything is going to actually last.
I have no predictive abilities on that front.
Even experts trying to predict that have difficulty because a whole lot of outcome is based on individual action.
And if people don't take this seriously, the time frame for things to get back to what you might call normal is going to extend.
And there's just almost...
You'll see these people who have models and they always have very different outcomes depending on different actions that are taken.
And even those are, you know, who knows.
The 18-month number that Alex is talking about is specifically related to the UK.
Boris Johnson had previously announced that their strategy was going to be trying to develop a herd immunity to the virus by people just going on living their lives, which epidemiologists roundly said was a very bad idea.
According to an article in Time, modeling of that strategy, of the herd immunity strategy, found that it would, quote, exceed healthcare systems' maximum capacities many times over.
So I thought that's what he was talking about, because there was an article about Boris Johnson having to be like, wow, this is going to take a long time.
But it's still not 18 months in lockdown.
This wave may last that extent of time.
So I thought that's what it was, but that's not where the 18-month number comes from.
That's the estimated time it will take to develop and get approval for a vaccine, at which point all the restrictions for social distancing and similar measures would not be necessary.
This is not a statement that anyone is going to be in lockdown for 18 months.
It's merely a reflection that we will need to have some sort of containment considerations probably until there's a vaccine.
It's also inaccurate to say that these things will only last a few weeks.
That's a slight misunderstanding of statements from health officials about the lengths of things like stay-at-home rules like we have here in Illinois, which lasts until April 7th.
There is a possibility that it'll extend after that.
Maybe.
Probably.
But that's the period where things can be reassessed and experts will know a little bit more at that point.
So when people are saying it'll last two weeks, they're not saying that, hey, we're all good in two weeks.
That's the period and then we'll reassess and know more from that point.
It's probably pessimistic to assume that social distancing measures will last 18 months, but it's also probably naive to assume it'll only last two weeks.
It's probably a good idea to expect worse than the best case scenario, but if people take this seriously and we get lucky on the medical side of things, the worst case scenario doesn't have to come to pass either.
The other thing that this is based on is a post on Michael Snyder's economic collapse blog, which Alex has reposted on Infowars, titled, quote, The U.S. government is preparing for an 18-month pandemic and critical shortages.
The sub-headline is, quote, Are you prepared for the nationwide shutdown that's happening now to last 18 months?
This blog post is based on a 103-page Health and Human Services document that the New York Times released, titled, U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan.
The only place in this document that 18 months comes up is in the section that lists the assumptions that this plan was based on.
And number two is, quote, a pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness.
It would be important to also point out that assumption number three is, quote, the spread and severity of COVID-19 will be difficult to forecast and characterize.
So that's even kind of a caveat to assumption number two.
This is a document that's primarily about government agency responsibility for various considerations.
It's an organizational document more than anything else, and I think it would be a real stretch to assume that you can take this document to prove that even the government is planning for an 18-month lockdown.
The thing that's important to remember is that this 18-month number is an assumption of how long the pandemic may have an effect on the country that requires a plan, but that doesn't mean the same thing as there's going to be a year and a half lockdown.
One key point is that this is a full plan, and it involves a stage after the active pandemic in its timeline.
The phase where it would be returning to what they call a quote, pre-epidemic posture.
That's part of the 18-month lifespan of whatever they're assuming.
This doesn't say that there will be an 18-month lockdown.
And in fact, one of the most critical considerations of the document is, quote, revisions in the scenarios, modeling, and projections used to inform planning, and consequent changes in planning should be made to accommodate changes in knowledge about COVID-19 characteristics affecting the parameters used for this modeling.
The truck drivers are still delivering, but most people in the warehouses have panicked, put their tail between their legs, and run home, not understanding you're going to get a big, giant Great Depression now.
This is in the middle of a discussion about Alex's food buckets that kind of feels like a sales pitch, but he's also saying that my Patriot Supply has stopped taking new orders.
I'm not sure if that's true, because according to their website, I just checked it, in an update from March 20th, they're still taking orders.
There's a 12-week delivery window.
I'm not sure what the situation is here.
Maybe they've said, Alex, you're not taking orders.
No, I'm not a bad person for obviously exploiting this crisis that I didn't know was this bad until pretty much right fucking now, and now I feel bad about it.
So we've heard Alex talk about that in the past, how millions starved to death during the Great Depression, and we've discussed how it's absolutely not true.
He keeps bringing it up, though, and in this case, it's in the context of talking about his food bucket, so I was a little curious about this claim and where it comes from.
The one thing you can be certain of is anytime Alex says something comes from quote major universities, it does not come from major universities.
It turns out that this stat traces back to research done in 2008 by a Russian gentleman named Boris Borisov.
And this research was widely covered in outlets like Pravda and RT, but it didn't get a ton of traction outside of those places, most likely because his work was very flawed.
Demographers have looked at his assumptions and found that the research is just not good.
His basic point is that if you review census data, there are about 7 million people unaccounted for during the Great Depression, and therefore they must have all starved to death.
Leaving aside how that's a gigantic leap to make, and it's unclear if 7 million are even unaccounted for during that period, there's a ton of other explanations for the demographic numbers, like people not filling out censuses during the Great Depression, or mass relocation caused by things like the Dust Bowl.
Without minimizing the hardships of people living in the Depression era, there's just no good evidence that 7 million people died of starvation.
And that raises the question, what's behind this claim that Borisov is making?
It's pretty explicit in that Pravda article that the intention here was to frame the Great Depression as America's holodomor.
The Hall of Demore is way too complicated for us to get into on this episode, but this is super weird for Alex.
He is a huge anti-communist, anti-USSR guy.
His entire worldview has grown out of the red-baiting hardliners during and after the Cold War, so it seems very out of sync for him to be citing a statistic about US deaths during the Great Depression that was more or less produced as a propaganda narrative to minimize the case of the USSR causing a famine that killed millions.
This is an instance where the message of the erroneous stat That 7 million US citizens starved in the Great Depression is more important than the context of where that stat comes from.
It's because Alex is selling these food buckets, and the erroneous stat helps him further and justify that goal.
So who cares if it comes from a pro-USSR, anti-USA piece of propaganda?
Like, the abyss-looking-back kind of period of right-wing history.
You know, all of these guys are born from a blatant anti-communist lunatic mill, but because the only people now who agree with them in terms of propaganda output are those former communist people, they have to become strange men.
It's just like a...
Radical Christians agree more with radical Islam than they do with anything else.
The strange times make strange bedfellows kind of situation there.
You would think if you find this article about 7 million Americans dying of starvation during the Great Depression, you would maybe look into it.
And then you'd be like, huh, that's not true.
Why is this person making this claim?
Like I did.
Alex did none of that.
He's just like, yep, Boris Borisov sounds great.
I'm going to pretend I saw that from a major university.
And we are going with it.
He is a dumb asshole.
So, there's a thing that's going on that I think is really good and appropriate.
And that is that certain states are taking moves to release people from prison during this coronavirus outbreak because overcrowding in prisons will be very detrimental to people's health.
There's an article from yesterday saying hundreds.
But don't worry, I have all the stacks of articles right here that if you get caught in France trying to go out and even walk your dog, you're going to jail.
Oh, they're letting the Islamics out and they're letting the child molesters out, but they want you, the producer, to know we own your ass.
The government website literally lists the acceptable reasons to leave your home, and one of them is, quote, for short trips close to your home linked to physical individual activity and for the needs of domestic pets.
They've put in a system where you need to fill out a form to have in your possession in case you're out and you're stopped by a patrolling officer, which I'm not super thrilled with, but I kind of understand.
I don't know this for certain, but I have to think that if you're out walking your dog, even if you don't have one of those forms, you're probably just going to get a warning.
Either way, France isn't putting people in jail for violating the quarantine guidelines.
As to the issue of California releasing prisoners, I can't find any evidence that the prisoners being released are the ones who are convicted of violent crimes.
And from what I can tell, it's mostly people who had pretty short times left on their sentences to begin with.
Prison overcrowding is a very serious issue, particularly in a public health crisis.
Anything that can be done to minimize the risk that incarcerated persons face is something that should be considered.
Does that mean releasing all murderers?
Not necessarily, but it does mean possibly releasing nonviolent drug offenders so there's appropriate space to house the violent offenders in the prison setting responsibly.
From everything I can tell from the articles I've read, that's basically what's happening.
For someone like Alex, who allegedly is opposed to people being in jail for drugs and likes to pretend he's a fucking libertarian, it should be a good thing.
But it's not, because he wants to try and turn it into a wedge thing where they're letting the Islamicists, all the immigrants, they're letting them run wild, but you, the producers, they're going to jam you up.
How can you be defensive about food sales and then all of a sudden be like, well, yeah, obviously we need to get rid of all illegal aliens and immigrants and Muslims.
And you should buy pills, too.
Just so you know.
We need to get rid of all the immigrants, but you should buy pills.
From my position, anybody who has any concerns about Alex really being on the up and up and being right about stuff, go check on that behavior and come back and talk to me.
So Alex on this episode is mostly on the martial law is coming.
It's here.
Tip.
There's not a whole lot of evolution in terms of narratives about the virus, because a lot of that's pretty solidified.
All that stuff about Bill Gates is nonsense, and it's stuff we've gone over in the past, but I wanted to check in real quick with Alex's claim there at the end that all these diseases come out of China.
There are a lot of avian influenzas, but obviously the one Alex is talking about is H5N1.
Interestingly, the first case of human H5N1 was found in Hong Kong, which, according to Alex's stated policy set, he doesn't believe that's part of China.
The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic was one that had a more...
At the time, it had a pretty openly debated origin.
People weren't entirely clear.
In 2016, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai demonstrated through genetic analysis that that virus traced back to central Mexico.
SARS and the current outbreak are fair to say that they started in China, but using that information in any context outside of epidemiology sounds kind of pointless.
Alex doesn't really know anything about this topic, as evidenced by his claim that all these outbreaks originated in China.
He's just trying to play the game of assigning blame to his chosen target, in this case, China, Bill Gates.
Also, if he's saying that these are the four big pandemics, then what about Zika and MERS?
Or what about Ebola?
He did a whole lot of Ebola coverage in his day, so it's weird to see that left off his list.
Because they're not just trying to blame Trump with this and kill the economy as they said they would do to bring down Trump and to teach Americans, as Bill Maher said, to roll over and bow down.
So, you can see in that clip, again, the only reference Alex can ever make when he talks about the plan to bring down the economy to get rid of Trump is something Bill Maher said on HBO.
Alex wants you to believe that there's an elaborate globalist conspiracy afoot, but weirdly...
So last week, there were a lot of stories that came out about people in Congress selling off stock, weirdly, right after they got a briefing about the coronavirus situation.
According to The Hill, Republicans' Kelly Loeffler...
James Inhofe and Richard Burr, as well as Democrat Dianne Feinstein, quote, each sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock within days of the Senate holding a classified briefing on January 24th with Trump administration officials on the threat of the coronavirus outbreak.
Everyone's got an excuse, but I'm not sure anyone cares.
I don't know what the government should do about these individual cases, but it's probably time to ban elected officials from having stocks.
The inherent conflict of interest is just something we apparently can't trust people to handle responsibly when they're supposed to be acting in the public interest.
I thought that's what Alex was talking about when he said people are shorting.
What these congresspeople did was sell stock, presumably based on non-public information, which might be accurately called insider trading.
But that's not the same thing as short selling.
Short selling is a super risky market play that goes like this.
You have a hunch that a business's stock is going to drop in price.
So you borrow stocks from someone willing to lend them to you.
Then you immediately sell them with the expectation that you can buy them back later for a substantially lower price.
At that point, you can return the stocks to the lender and pocket the profits.
You theoretically make a lot of money without any initial investment.
The downside is that if your hunch is wrong and the stocks increase in value after you sell them, you're on the hook to buy them back for an increased price so you can return them to the lender.
Because of this potential gigantic downside, most people don't advise anyone to fuck around with stuff like short selling.
As Market Watch explains, if you buy stocks normally, the most you can lose is 100% of your money.
Conversely, with short selling, the amount you lose is literally limitless.
You could lose any amount of money.
Alex is not talking about these congresspeople when he's talking about short-selling, but because there is a story that's going to be coming up about it, I wanted to explain what short-selling was before we get to that.
Well, what they don't tell you when they're all up there manipulating the market on television is that they're shorting it, and they started shorting it 10 weeks ago, and I went and looked it up.
And they said a depression is going to stop Trump.
If I played all the clips, we would take the rest of the hour up.
So I know that he says that he has all these clips and he can't play them because it'll take the rest of the hour, but as I've listened to his show, I've never heard a compelling clip that he's played that indicates that anyone is saying that we would like the market to go down to hurt Trump, except Bill Maher.
So apparently he's talking about this guy Bill Ackman, who had just done a fairly strange and possibly alarming segment on CNBC where he'd advocated Trump call for a 30-day nationwide shutdown of the economy.
I think his quote was something along the lines of, like, capitalism can't work with an 18-month shutdown, but it can survive a 30-day complete lockdown or whatever.
He had some very doom-laden predictions, but he also said that he was buying stock, which led to a lot of people accusing him of having short positions.
As Business Insider put it, there were accusations, quote, that he was trying to scare investors into selling so he could buy at a discount or profit from short bets.
Beyond those accusations, I don't see any proof being provided that he actually did have those short positions.
It's just something that people were saying.
Also, Ackman is not involved with Soros in any meaningful way, beyond them both being hedge fund billionaires.
Most of the articles you can find about the two of them are about how they have opposite positions on some company over time.
Ackman also doesn't hate Trump.
A Vanity Affair article from November 2016 says, quote, Bill Ackman looks at President Trump and likes what he sees.
A Fortune article from the same time, quote, Bill Ackman says he's bullish on Trump.
In his comments about how the economy should shut down for a month to save itself, he was even complimentary toward Trump, saying that if he could navigate this crisis, he could be re-elected in November.
Ackman's hedge fund had invested in a company called Valiant, eventually leading to approximately them having control of 10% of the shares.
And that company has had some drug price gouging issues.
In 2017, Ackman sold off all his shares in Valiant and in the process lost $4 billion.
He would go on to apologize for the investment in the company, but mostly for losing his investors money, not for the price gouging, because he wasn't the person who made that decision.
So anyway, Alex doesn't really know anything about this guy, but he, I guess, is a villain now.
So Alex claims, without providing any evidence, any proof, that Bill Ackman is shorting key industries in the United States.
We covered this in extended detail in our endgame coverage, but the basic element of this is that the story gained popularity first in 1846 when it was told in a pamphlet signed by a person calling themselves Satan.
It was actually written by a very public anti-Semitic named George Dainville.
The story is directly contradicted by historical evidence, but the narrative caught on anyway, and you can find it popping up all over the place in dicey settings, like the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Rothschild Shares at Waterloo.
This is pure and simple, no two ways about it, an anti-Semitic piece of historical fiction.
Anybody who repeats this line is either someone pushing it knowing fully well that it's bogus, or they're the sort of person who would uncritically accept narratives that find a good fit in Nazi wartime propaganda.
I have no idea if Ackman is short-selling any industries, and Alex has provided no proof of it on this show.
I would suspect that he's probably not, seeing as on April 16th, 2019, he announced that he and his hedge fund, Pershing Square, had, quote, for sworn short-selling.
Maybe he was lying, though.
I don't know.
And Alex doesn't either.
So, Alex talks more about this.
They said they're going to break down the economy!
They're killing the economy by design, and if you remember...
Democrats, MSNBC, CNN, HBO host, like Bill Maher, they've all come out and said over and over and over again that they were going to plunge the economy, that it was worth it to stop Donald Trump.
Because I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy.
So please, bring on the recession.
But as far as the winning economy that the president needs from now until November, do you really see that changing?
Well, I'll give you two examples.
2008, at this time, nobody thought we would have a global financial crisis right on our shores.
And that's the thing that really sunk John McCain's candidacy then.
Think about 2008.
You know what happened in Q4 2018?
The stock market fell 20%.
You know what also happened?
The Dems took back the house in that period.
So if the stock market were to tumble this year, if we don't get near the 3% GDP growth that this administration has been talking about for years, these are all things that Dems can run on, and they pose a problem.
So almost that entire compilation is clips of Bill Maher.
One of them is just a pundit saying that Democrats can run on economic issues if the stock market is bad, which is a little shy of rooting for the market to collapse to hurt Trump.
The only clip in there, other than Bill Maher, that's questionable at all is the first one.
That was from an interview that took place in August 2019 on Fox News.
The person speaking is Stephen Moore, who is an economic advisor to Trump, a writer for the Heritage Foundation, and author of a book called Trumponomics.
So interestingly, that interview begins with a clip of Bill Maher.
And the whole premise of the...
This was one in a series of interviews that followed that same theme that Stephen Moore did, all based on an essay that he had written about Democrats rooting for a recession.
It was posted on the Heritage Foundation's website.
Interestingly, that article begins, quote, last week I gave a talk to high-wealth investors in San Francisco, not exactly an audience of left-wing activists.
That's where he runs into this woman who wanted a recession to get rid of Trump.
I don't know.
I'm not sure if I buy this apocryphal story from one of Trump's advisors about how Trump's opposition wants to destroy the economy to hurt Trump.
They're saying, oh, you're all still going to get it.
That's why we made it.
But we're going to space it out over 18 months.
And, of course, you know, once you've lived with having to have your papers go outside your house and drones barking orders at you for 18 months, you're never going back.
Never going back.
Never coming back.
Just like the UN said, world government needs a bioweapon or a new plague to get the public to accept surveillance and control and forced inoculation and gun confiscation.
So we better start having a discussion about that.
Well, I don't know if he has explicitly, but implicitly, based on his rhetoric, A then B, B then C, A then C. It's a very simple equation of the things that he preaches.
Produces stuff for hospitals and over-the-counter and everything else.
And as soon as everybody found out, the regulators, that Walmart sells this under another name and makes claims that ABL has that they've certified, it all went away, didn't it?
There's no reason there would be any more stories unless the New York Attorney General takes further action, and you wouldn't expect that to happen so quickly.
It's perfect for Alex, though.
He gets to pretend that the fact that there's no more stories means that he was vindicated.
In reality, it doesn't really mean anything.
And I notice on this show, he's being far more fucking careful.
It's the big megabanks and the most powerful Fortune 500 exerting their will.
To start a stampede in non-essential areas they were running, to have their executives go home but actually keep all their companies operating, to then cancel some big public events and have governments declare martial law in areas like Europe and China, to then set the precedent to create the hysteria and the fear to have that done here if Trump didn't follow suit, monkey see, monkey do.
And the big thing this will create is unrest in the end.
They know within a month we'll be into a depression with this lockdown once it's in place.
And they're incrementally putting more in every day.
Trump's been bucking it, but trying to give the rhetoric that he's doing this so that he doesn't get the political blame for the death he knows is already coming.
He's following a balancing act that we really advised him to cover.
He's either listening to us or he came up with the exact same pragmatic system because...
Regardless, they're going to hype every event like it's the end of the world.
If I understand that clip, Alex is saying that the megabanks are the ones who are creating the hysteria, which involves putting Italy and China into a lockdown in order to force Trump to do the same here.
This is the complete rollout with digital tattoos out of the skin, microchips, total tracking, absolute domination, absolute total control, because after all...
We have to get rid of...
Diving boards.
We have to get rid of dodgeball and chase at the school.
Someone might hit their knee.
And now they're not even allowed to talk at many recesses or shake hands.
And we're all being trained to be these jellyfish and stay in our homes and watch the TV screens.
And the robots will tend the fields.
And the robots will bring us the food.
And the robots will enforce it like THX 1138, the actual globalist plan.
You know, back a few weeks ago when they said Tom Hanks had it on that weekend, I went live on Sunday and I said, I think this is either made up or it's PR to overshadow Trump's emergency announcement.
Prince Philip didn't run his mouth about wanting to depopulate the world with a bioweapon.
Alex is just lying about a quote from the foreword to a 1987 book called If I Were an Animal.
This was a book where a hundred or so celebrities answered the question of what animal they would like to be.
Prince Philip said, I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.
That's a little different than running his mouth about wanting to depopulate the world with a bioweapon, but when you're Alex Jones, you're not a big fan of details.
I don't know what quotes Alex is talking about with Prince Bernhard, but I'm just guessing it's a reference to him funding the creation of the World Wildlife Fund.
Also, I don't think Bernhard and Philip are cousins, and Bernhard's been dead for 16 years, so who cares?
A bit of that stuff we covered in the Endgame documentary, there's some of those claims, and you can go back and hear that stuff if you want to there, but this is the sort of stuff that I'm just not even going to really engage with all too much, because it's just like, alright Alex, enjoy.
Francis Galton and Charles Darwin do share a grandfather, though, and Galton was a eugenicist.
So, I mean, there's some kernels of reality behind stuff you're saying, but like, you know, in 2015, Ben Carson told a crowd at a creationist conference that Darwin's ideas were encouraged by Satan.
You know, what you need to realize is, like, this is all, like, laughable and stuff, but this is pretty standard, like, extreme Christian creationist talking points.
So, if you want to tell me that Alex Jones is right about things, you now must explain to me that he is right about aliens working with the globalists to kill humanity.
Because if you're not deceived and I don't think they can rope you in, they're going to try to absolutely go watch Buckaroo Banzai when the guy goes in the other dimension for a second and then they get him for a minute and he comes back crazy.
Let me tell you, they don't just put that in Hollywood movies because they just thought this up, okay?
Also, eagle-eared listeners will remember that back in that Ask Me Anything episode that me and Robert Evans recorded, Alex got one of his questions was, are you a fan of Buckaroo Banzai?
You know, because what this is going to do is going to, you know, it has Alex's tacit stamp of approval because he just moves on to the next topic and says, sir, that's an irresponsible thing to suggest.
So the audience listening to this will internalize a message of, I better not go get tested if I have some sort of symptom.
It's a total economic takeover with U.S. corporations that are really globalist allied with China using this to shut us down.
And if Trump says it's bull, they'll show the thousands that die every week or so and hype it up that it's his fault.
So again, it's the weakness of the average American, the cowardice, the loving to get into a pity party, the wanting to be a victim, the wanting to get a welfare check, the wanting to win the lottery.
It's not all Americans, but it's the overall weakness.
Indian scientist discovers coronavirus engineer with HIV-like insertions, and it's got all the actual genes and protein signatures cut into it where they know it was gene-edited, okay?
It's like, how do you know a woman's had a breast job?
Those are the pieces of information that he's able to pull out when he's trying to demonstrate that the virus is man-made, which tells me he has no evidence of that at all.
Especially considering, you remember the last time they amped up a story like that?
Or Alex, like, I just keep thinking about the migrant caravan over and over and over again.
Of them being like, oh, they're amping, this is hysteria, this is insane, how dare they, they would never make this kind of, and it's like, you guys went apeshit over...
Teaching you that you've got to be tracked by a cell phone to go outside.
We talked about China a month ago tracking people with their cell phones before they could leave their houses.
Making them download a government app.
Well, now we broke on Monday.
DrudgeReport.com picked it up that MIT and Bill and Melinda Gates have a plan to make you wear a bracelet that changes colors and a digital tattoo that you take under the skin that shows you've been inoculated and that they'll track you by your cell phone.
So there's really no resource on this Bill Gates stuff other than an article on Infowars whose only source is an anonymous, quote, cybersecurity white hat government contractor.
Suffice it to say, that means literally nothing to me, and I reject it.
So the stuff about the invisible ink tattoo for vaccination records isn't related to the coronavirus outbreak.
That was a research project that was taking place at MIT previous to all this, and it did receive some funding from Bill Gates, but that doesn't really prove any of the conclusions Alex is jumping to.
An article in Futurism from December 2019 describes it as, quote, proof of concept and that, quote, in human cadaver skin models, the patterns outlasted five years of simulated sun exposure.
I would assume that if the goal is maintaining some kind of vaccination record, then that's not nearly good enough to achieve that outcome.
This may be a ways off from being viable and it's not approved for use.
Also, it's not Bill Gates that wants to use cell phones to track people.
According to reporting in the Washington Post from the 19th, quote, in the United States, the White House has been in negotiation with major tech companies, including Google and Facebook, about potentially using aggregated and anonymized location data created by smartphone use, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
But those efforts have been kept largely from the public.
Alex can play all these games he wants where Trump's employees and administration officials do things that they're not supposed to do, according to Alex, or secret deep state moles.
But at a certain point, he's just going to have to face the music that his hero is the villain of his career, and he fucking loves him.
So Alex is making up the digital tattoos part of that article about Asian use of innovative tech.
This is an article from the Japan Times, not Yahoo News, and it's about how China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are testing out approaches to medical tracking that might be a little bit invasive.
The article is about an app that people can download on their smartphone which is connected to a bracelet.
This is pretty extreme stuff, but from the article, it only references those bracelets being used in the case of people who are subject to compulsory quarantine because they had returned from overseas.
That's not to say it's great, but it's not quite as horrendous as Alex is making it out to be.
So the first point, and I think this should be probably obvious, Alex is lying about what Governor Newsom said in the press conference.
He was saying that martial law is not necessary at this point because people were recognizing there was a public need to act and people were stepping up.
We'll play the clip that Alex plays.
It's the next clip.
So that's all bullshit.
But I wanted to talk about Alex's kidnapping metaphor.
He loves telling that little story.
Like, he legitimately does that bit all the time.
He talks about a kidnapper threatening to kill you unless you put on handcuffs, and if you put on the handcuffs, you're dead.
It's a fine metaphor and all, but I have a different one that might be more appropriate for Alex.
I would suggest that this is more like taking your dog to the vet.
Your dog is a stupid asshole that doesn't understand medicine, but it still suffers from medical issues.
And you know what?
That dog's medical issues are going to affect other people and other dogs.
Whether it's because you ignore a dog's health and then a problem gets worse to the point where it requires an expensive surgery, or because the dog has a condition that can transmit to another dog at the park, that dog has to be taken care of.
And it's too fucking stupid to do it on its own.
In case you don't get it, Alex is the dog.
He'll fight and bark and yell all the way to the vet.
Maybe even try to bite you, but it's for his own good and everyone else's own good.
I'm not saying that Alex should be put down or forced into a FEMA camp for his own good or anything like that, but when the state is enacting certain measures that are necessary to stop the spread of a very dangerous pandemic, he's the dog in the backseat on the way to a vet.
You just need to ignore his stupid, meaningless barking.
And as I said in the past, if you want to establish a framework of martial law, which is ultimate authority and enforcement, we have the capacity to do that, but we are not at this point.
moment, feeling that as a necessity, and to the extent that people do not socialize I would be surprised and we have all the confidence it will be.
If you are the globalists, why wouldn't you take this opportunity to declare martial law when even the reporter is like, do you think you should declare martial law?
And then we heard a few weeks ago that Chlora, Chloroquine, an inexpensive malaria drug, is having incredible effects on people if it's caught before it gets too late, even if you're old.
And I've got a bunch of articles and studies and reports here on that, but anybody can pull up chloroquine, C-H-L-O-R-A-Q-U-I-N.
So there was a bit of a story that went around over the weekend that I regret to inform you this episode predates.
On Saturday, Trump retweeted a tweet that cited a French study claiming to show that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were effective in treating COVID-19.
This led to some scientists chiming in and pointing out that the study itself was very poorly constructed and that the groups that were tested were very small to the point of being inconclusive.
And then it got worse.
Jared Holt pointed out that the account that Trump retweeted was actually a guy who used to go by the name Mike Tokes, who had a bit of a habit of hanging out with neo-Nazis like Baked Alaska.
He was even covered in an article in The Guardian about the figures who were putting together that alt-right rally in Portland back in 2017.
A number of doctors pointed out that advising people to take hydroxychloroquine and zithromycin was dangerous, and it could actually result in heart failure.
I was worried that Alex's talk about the drug predated Trump's, but it turns out Trump was talking shit about chloroquine in his White House briefing on Thursday when he lied about it being FDA approved to treat coronavirus.
I have absolutely no words to describe the level of despair I feel seeing this particular little chapter play out and knowing that it's just a blip on the larger radar.
The president lied about the FDA approving a medication for a pandemic, then retweeted a guy named Mike Toks who hangs out with Nazis, touting an inconclusive study that led to a spike in demand for that medication and at least two overdoses in Nigeria.
Well, I think he's too defensive about people calling him out for that, and so he can't show ass by being like, sorry, look, I shouldn't have done that.
So he ends up doing it more.
And maybe the New York Attorney General's office will take notice and fine him.
It's theorized, but it's not proven or even a consensus opinion that chloroquine acts as an ionosphere.
Which allows extra zinc to enter the cells.
It doesn't have zinc itself, so for Alex's promotion here to make sense, he would really be needing to try to sell his audience the real red pill and also say that they should take chloroquine.
That's really irresponsible stuff.
And you can just see the levels and layers of profiteering Alex is trying to engage in.
So on the one hand, I agree with and applaud Alex for calling for all these people in Congress to be treated equally and resign if this is actually a case of insider trading, which it appears to be.
I don't think he'd have that position if one of them was Jim Jordan.
But whatever.
That's a counterfactual.
I can't really prove that that's true, but I bet he would be different.
And that's really pissing off Alex because he wants to have fun and yell conspiracies.
But because I listened to Alex's show, I remember that Alex only learned who Fauci was back on February 8th, when Alex misread a headline and decided to report that Anthony Fauci was coming out at Trump's behest and saying that they believed the virus was man-made.
This, of course, was a load of bullshit, but it led to Alex saying this, which is really funny now.
The president, through his medical spokesperson, who's very respected, made a lot of calls about Fauci in the last few months, I knew who he was, and they say he's very respected, a quote, legend.
And you've talked about the coronavirus and what's going on, and I started to do some research in the past month or so, and I started to find out what's really going on, and it scared the crap out of me.
I don't know if Shemaine Nugent is a respected name in the field of research or anything like that.
I think she's mostly relevant because she's Ted's wife.
I went to her website and apparently she's into Zumba and some years back she got sick because toxic mold in her walls which encouraged her to get into alternative medicine.
I noticed that she doesn't say where either of these degrees are from because probably, you know, the metaphysics degree is from some scammy diploma bill.
Real accredited universities do not offer degrees in metaphysics.
When someone has a degree in metaphysics on their resume, particularly when their other educational background isn't in some other solid form of philosophy or maybe theology, it's a major sign that they have a fake degree.
Metaphysics is a real branch of philosophy, but it's not something universities give degrees in.
It's the same thing with most branches of philosophy.
Like, if I had pursued a philosophy major instead of a minor in college, I would have a bachelor's degree in philosophy.
So I see them trying to use the virus against Trump, saying it's his fault, but at the same time, it's also an opportunity for Trump to mop up the deep state.
So I think both sides are trying to use it right now.
I do believe that there is an orchestrated group of individuals that some people have called Q, who have been dropping breadcrumbs, so to speak, for those of us.
And the information is available online.
I have told my people to do the research for themselves.
If he asks too many questions, it's going to get into her promoting Q, and he has a stated position of hating Q, which he said earlier in the episode, or on the day before, and pretty consistently.
So he doesn't want to yell and make fun of Ted Nugent's wife.
He needs to keep Ted Nugent his friend.
So he keeps being like, oh, I hear maybe Ted's going to drop in.
If you have specific information from the National Guard, NORTHCOM, Space Command, Central Command, Army Special Operations, Threat Fusion Centers, State Police...
So Alex puts out that call for callers from high intel areas because he wants to hear what they're hearing.
That's great, but I highly doubt anyone in those areas is likely to call in and even less likely to disseminate private information on Alex's dumb show.
What this is, it's not actually a plea for intelligence people in the audience to call in.
In function, this is Alex signaling to the audience that if they call in and claim to be intelligence, he's going to let them.
He won't question them and is willing to take at face value all the information the audience might present as appearing official.
Basically, what he's doing is establishing an improv game.
So, on our last episode, we heard Alex claiming that there were ten strains of the virus, and now there's just two that he's talking about.
Seems weird.
Maybe ten numbers or something he made up because he was rambling and talking shit.
Speaking of talking shit, this stuff he's saying about two strains is not something that is a scientific consensus.
There is preliminary research that suggests that there's what's called the S strain, which is the ancestral strain, the original one that jumped from animal to human, which at some point mutated into the L strain, which appears to be better adapted to jump from human to human.
When it's called the more aggressive strain, this is a reference to its ability to transmit from person to person, not because it causes a more severe illness.
The Guardian reported on March 11th that, quote, it is not yet clear whether the two strains cause different severity of disease.
Alex has heard a few words, like more aggressive and two strains, and he's just creating a story out of that that fits his needs.
Whether or not studies do eventually show that there are, in fact, two distinct strains of the virus and that one causes a more severe illness, it doesn't matter.
So the media isn't saying there's going to be 3 million deaths in the United States from coronavirus.
They're covering a March 16th report from Imperial College that estimated that if literally nothing was done, it could result in 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 510,000 in The report prefaces this prediction by saying, quote, So that's kind of the setup.
It's the unlikely nothing is done.
Alex and Mike Adams have misused Imperial College estimates in the past.
They were talking about 50,000 new cases a day in China.
So they should be totally on board for this.
Except now he's trying to downplay the virus or something.
So it's kind of just the media is being hysterical.
If we lost a million, we lost the Civil War back when our population was 20% of what it is now.
If we lost a million...
And don't panic about it.
It's sad.
You know, it's not good.
But if you have a Great Depression, you can pull up the university studies.
7 million.
Pull up the articles.
University studies.
7 million starved to death from malnutrition and Great Depression.
7 million people in the 10-year Great Depression or 11-year Great Depression ended up starving to death, they estimate.
So if the whole society collapses...
That is not good.
And the food's going to run out.
So, again, it's like where you get startled and then fall down the stairs and break your neck because your wife says, hey, honey, and you fall down the stairs and break your neck or have a heart attack.
And I see that's what is unfolding.
And it's just the getting into it and the hysteria and the fear.
Okay, if you remember, Trump banned bump stocks after that that went into effect in March of 19. And then we started learning the CDC started hiring in November of 19 for all these quarantine officers.
So it's all connected, Alex, because they didn't want you to be able to get bump stocks to prepare for the martial law.
Yeah, you want him to have that happy, or the Billy Madison moment of just like, if you, sir, have wasted everybody's time, and may God have mercy on your soul.
So the driving point of Alex's coverage in these couple of days is definitely that martial law is already here, and it's the Democrats and the globalists doing it.
On the one hand, this is a mess for Alex because he's always been pretty clear that when martial law is happening, it's time to start a revolutionary war.
But leaving that aside, there's another really serious problem with what Alex is suggesting, namely that he's suggesting that the left is responsible for making these martial law moves.
Perhaps Alex would like to try and explain some new reporting.
Politico reported on Saturday that Trump's Department of Justice, run by his good buddy Bill Barr, had, quote, quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.
It's really staggering, the level of control the DOJ was requesting.
From that Politico article, quote, In one of the documents, the department proposed that Congress grant the Attorney General power to ask the chief judge of any district court to pause court proceedings whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.
Also from that article, quote, So that means you would be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.
I find it absolutely terrifying.
Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.
Alex Jones, the champion of civil liberties, will not likely cover this story.
He wants Trump to become a dictator.
He's been very clear about it.
Alex doesn't care about civil liberties for their own sake.
They were always a means to an end for him.
And it was an issue that was central to the popularity of people like Ron Paul, so he had to push it really hard.
It's always been a Trojan horse, and circumstances like this are really just dropping the masks.
If Alex doesn't come out and immediately completely reverse course on Trump after his Department of Justice is asking for the power to detain people indefinitely without trial, he should fucking throw in the towel on everything he's ever pretended to stand for because that shit is over.
But we'll see.
I mean, that happened on Saturday, and this is Friday's episode.
But it's comical, the idea that he's trying to say that the globalists on the left is doing all this stuff, and Trump is a heroic force fighting against it, when there's all of these instances of Trump doing the exact things that he normally would be screaming about.
I still don't think that even if Trump does all of the negative things he may do, that he automatically becomes king and all the senators become dukes.
I will openly accept that conversation and the difficulties in finding a solution or a conclusion that we can all feel comfortable with from anybody but anyone who's ever been on Infowars.
So, we come to the end of this, and I think that Alex is...
I think that the...
You know, it's not as painful as I expected it to be.
You know, it is in some ways.
There's a lot of this stuff that is like, well, this is pretty dangerous.
And if people listen to this as opposed to experts, they run the risk of stymieing the efforts of the country getting through this successfully.
There's also a lot of stupid shit along the way, and I can always enjoy finding that, hey, Alex said that this 7 million people starved in the Great Depression.
Oh, that comes from Pravda trying to justify Soviets.
Right, so you have stuff like that, and that can keep my interest, and I appreciate little things like that being there.
And then at the same time, you just got this overwhelming sense of like, okay, The bottom line is the reason you think that the globalists released this virus is because they wanted to destroy the economy to embarrass Trump.
And your only defense you can ever give for that is fucking Bill Maher.
That's fun to think about.
And the fact that Alex thinks that every single goddamn movie is real.