In Knowledge Fight’s breakdown of Alex Jones’ April 21–22, 2020 segments, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes expose his misattributed Jefferson quote (actually from a 1914 anti-socialist debate), absurd COVID-19 claims—like doctors "hoarding" orgies—and hypocritical pivots, such as praising AG William Barr after demanding Trump fire him. Jones frames economic collapse as an "inside job," mocks mask-wearing as "bravery," and teases a Gab alternative to Zoom, while Friesen rates Lacroix Lemoncello (80/100) and mocks Jones’ credibility, concluding his rhetoric is both dangerous and self-serving. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a rapid cycling of Alex's emotional state as we discuss April 21st and 22nd, 2020.
Okay, this is 2020.
God damn it.
But before we get down to business, I'd like to take a little moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show and making the year of the Seltzer possible.
If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoy the show, would like to support these gents, too.
You can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button to support the show, or you could find a local charity in your area and help provide support for folks in need in your communities.
First thing is that we're recording this on Thursday, and this is the day that Alex's bankruptcy hearing was supposed to happen.
And we don't know exactly what's going to happen because by the time we've started this episode, if we consult the docket, this morning, Alex's ex-wife filed an emergency motion.
She's trying to get Alex's lawyer disqualified on the basis that she says and asserts that the two of them have an existing relationship from back when she and Alex were married.
So we start here on the 21st, and Alex is still mad at Joy Behar and the view because they have said that people who are going out to these protests against quarantines and stay-at-home measures are terrorists.
And just having a gun or just carrying a gun isn't necessarily some sort of a terrorist act.
Now, bigger picture.
This should surprise no one, but that is not a Thomas Jefferson quote.
Yeah, no kidding.
It's commonly misattributed to Jefferson as well as to Thomas Paine, but Monticello, the world's foremost authority on the words and writings of Thomas Jefferson, have found no evidence that Jefferson ever said that.
In researching the source of this quotation, the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia reports that the first known appearance of this in print was in 1914 in an indictment of socialism delivered by John Basil Barnhill, a prominent anti-socialist debater of the time.
Interestingly, it's currently Barnhill's birthday.
It wasn't until 1994 that this quote was first repackaged and presented as the words of Thomas Jefferson in a book called It's All in the Game: Butterflies, Mind Control, The Razor's Edge.
It was written by a guy named Giorgio Siris Hatton, which is a name that most people would not recognize, but because I did a thorough breakdown of Alex's film Endgame, that name rings a bell for me.
Giorgio Sirius Hatton is the guy who was one of the big sources for Daniel Estelin's book, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, which Alex uses as a cornerstone of his theories about that group.
Hatton, of course, is not a reliable source.
Here's how Hatton describes himself: I am Giorgio Saris Hatton, Commander-in-Chief, Earth Project Transition, Pleiades Sector Flight Command, Intergalactic Federation Fleet, Ashtar Command, Earth Representative to the Cosmic Council and the Intergalactic Federal Federation Council on Earth Transition.
Now, there's a big paradox here between people like David Knight, Mike Adams, David Icke, and others who argue with each other and get mad at each other over different angles of this when it's completely normal with a government and the media that's been caught lying to us so much over and over again to question everything, and that's healthy, and you should do it.
I don't agree with David Icke that virus science isn't basically real.
And in another retcon of things that Alex has definitely done, he's now really firmly of the position that those videos that were coming out of China that he was reporting on as being totally real are now obviously fake out.
So Alex says this other thing that he does from time to time, like he'll often talk about how his website's being like it's under hack attack and stuff like that, just trying to like really escalate the tension.
He does that on this April 21st episode, but it's like, this is absolutely did not happen.
Look, I contacted the data center and they said that Ethan Hunt just came in through the roof and downloaded a virus into the system that only attacks GCN feeds of Alex Jones' show.
This reminds me a lot of Bill Cooper, too, honestly.
There's another thing that I'm going to cover eventually in the future, but there is a number of times throughout Bill's career that he has insisted that he's specifically under attack.
Of course.
And so that's something that also, it's just sort of, there's a rich tradition among conspiracy theory type broadcasters to create sort of dramatic arcs around there.
Because you have to.
You have to create the presentation that what you're doing is somehow dangerous.
And the only way to do that is to manufacture a danger.
So Alex is pretty mad that the media, the media, the evil media, all those bad guys.
They've said that he has the cure to the virus or something, or they've said that he's said that he has the cure.
So Alex in this next clip is complaining about how his friends and family believe that the media says that he said it, so they're asking him for the cure.
The thing that's important is like you have to recognize so many of these complaints that Alex has trace back to him having conversations with stupid people he chooses to associate with.
So it's like you can't, you can't generalize this to the population.
No, patient one or whatever, because he got it from meeting with a Chinese national student of some sort, I believe, is what he said.
I don't care.
It's all nonsense.
Me neither.
But the point here is that so many of these things that seem to make Alex mad are just dumb people and his family members talking to him or imagined conversations because this may not even happen.
We don't need Americans to think of it as extraordinary to go out and demonstrate in the face of this tyranny and the face of this fear.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
We need everyone to realize if you don't go out and demonstrate, if you don't go out and get over your fear, then you're dead already and you're part of the enemy operation.
It's either you demonstrate and you say no, or you're with the enemy.
It's not, oh, Alex Jones and Owen Schroyer are so great.
Is that there is no question that there will be a challenge, the coming administration, in the arena of infectious diseases, both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease, and we have certainly a large burden of that.
And if there's one message that I want to leave with you today based on my experience, and you'll see that in a moment, is that there is no question that there will be a challenge, the coming administration, in the arena of infectious diseases, both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease, and we have certainly a large burden of that.
But also there will be a surprise outbreak.
And I hope by the end of my relatively short presentation, you'll understand why history, the history of the last 32 years that I've been the director of NIAID, will tell the next administration that there's no doubt in anyone's mind that they will be faced with the challenges that their predecessors were faced with.
This is from a speech that Anthony Fauci gave at Georgetown University Medical Center just before Trump's inauguration.
It's very clear if you listen to his comments in context that Fauci is discussing the very normal phenomenon of surprise outbreaks.
The fact that Trump will experience a surprise outbreak is not an outlier.
It's exactly the same thing that previous presidents like Obama have experienced.
It's a fact of life that there will be emerging diseases.
There's always outbreaks.
The question is entirely about what these emerging diseases are and what the response to those outbreaks will be.
By ending the clip where Alex does, he makes the comment appear to be Fauci teasing that Trump, unlike past presidents, has a disease outbreak on the horizon, which now that there is a pandemic going on could be misrepresented and misinterpreted into him making some kind of a threat.
In its proper context, it's shown to Alex's narrative shown to be a complete mischaracterization of Fauci's words and an example of an absolute fabrication, either knowing or someone's feeding Alex's information.
By pretending that the globalists will respond to Trump's action by releasing more dangerous strains of the virus, Alex can rewrite the increased infections as a globalist attack instead of what it really is, the consequence of Trump's shitty leadership.
But what if Trump reopens things and there isn't a big increase in infections?
That seems unlikely, but it's certainly possible.
That would be a problem for Alex, it seems, since he said that the globalists are going to release more bioweapons to punish Trump for reopening the economy.
But it's not a problem for Alex because if that situation comes to pass, then he can say the globalists couldn't follow through with their plans because he called it out on air and foiled their scheme.
He tends to populate his world with things that can be spun no matter what happens in the real world because he's just making this stuff up to begin with.
I've had about a million things cross my brain that I wanted to bring up.
But I'm going to try and condense it down into three things.
Maybe four, and I'll try and be quick.
First one, I just wanted to bring up, and I don't think it's too late for you to do this, but I called in maybe three years ago, but I had made this suggestion.
And I know I'm not trying to put everything on you, but you have to file.
So this caller brings up his suggestion, and that is that he thinks that Alex should make some specific shirts.
And I'll agree with Alex that this isn't a good suggestion, but the way Alex responds is so fucking funny.
unidentified
Well, okay, so I had brought up the idea and you thought it was a good idea, but I called in a couple years ago and I said, hey, man, you should do some bumper stickers or shirts that say, and I got a couple other points I wanted to make really quick too, but you should maybe do some bumper stickers that say the coming economic collapse is an inside job.
And so all the yuppies wearing their mask and all the trendies getting into it, they're going to have everything they have taken and they're going to starve to death.
And it's good.
It's a blessing.
See, I'm beginning to realize that it's all a blessing.
All this crap's about to end.
All this fake stuff, all the laziness, all the stupidness, all the TV shows, all the Netflix.
I don't sit up here and do this show so I get money to keep paying this crew and keep running this place.
I do it because I have a responsibility, no matter how bad things get, to try to stay on the air to expose this so that we're here on air while these critical things are happening.
And I get mad thinking, if I don't do a good job and get the money to stay on air, when stuff gets even worse and worse and worse, we won't be here to challenge it.
And then I see the fact that there's not enough money to continue on at the level we're at.
And I just think about the fact that if people really realized how serious this was, they would do their job.
And I know a lot of you are, and get the word out about the guests and the shows and the things we cover because this is life and death.
And we predicted all of this because we've done our research and it's going to get a lot worse unless we turn this around.
And so there's a real desperation here, ladies and gentlemen.
And I see the lackadaisical attitude of the general public, and it enrages me.
But it's not their fault.
They've been put since birth in front of a TV in a trance state.
And we are a nation in a world of watchers, not of doers.
So you better start doing now instead of watching.
But they want you locked up in your house, watching, not doing.
They want jellyfish.
They're conquering us.
This is an electronic psychic spiritual takeover.
This is an overriding of the planet.
This is systematically planned out.
Mark of the beast, the whole nine yards.
So yes, I will tell listeners.
I appreciate your support, keeping us in the fight.
And I've got things and products that all of you already need.
And so I'll just tell you again with the things we go through here and what it takes to even stay in a position to defeat the globalist and the criminal nature of the system.
That if you haven't flooded us with support while getting good products at the same time, we wouldn't be here.
And my frustration isn't like I'm some victim saying, please stay keep me in the fight.
The longer I'm kept in the fight, the more they just want to kill me or put me in prison, which is fine.
I'm not suicidal.
I'll never commit suicide, but I'm really not worried about them grabbing me or putting me in handcuffs because all that matters is I've got to continue my mission, not backing down to the end.
And that's all in God's plan.
But I do want to do it to the fullest extent I can.
And that's why I'm asking folks that are around me and everybody else to take this damn serious because this is damn serious.
This is damn real.
So, X3, the UN reports.
And again, they report all this because they run it.
Almost 3 million people have lower IQs or mental cognitive disabilities.
Just go search eminent IH.gov because they don't have enough iodine.
The globalists love that.
That's why the average person is like a retarded jellyfish because they are.
So, I mean, like, his whole thing about like, I don't want money.
I just want to stay in the fight leads to an ad.
It's all still just part of the marketing presentation.
And at the end, I mean, we talked about this a hundred times.
Like, the iodine deficiency numbers that he's talking about are in developing countries and they're being fought by people like the UN.
Yeah.
The people who are the globalists that Alex hates are the people who are actively trying to solve the problem he's pretending exists largely in America.
So Alex, I mean, it's just that it's almost like an entire segment of the show, which is like this: I don't want, you know, I'm not doing this for money, but you got to flood us with money.
So this is a point that Alex kept hitting on this episode.
And it was something that I wasn't super interested in learning about, quite frankly, at first.
Let's say like the first 20 times that I heard him bring it up.
But it got to a point where I realized that it wasn't disinterest that was making me not want to get into it.
It was anger.
Here, Alex is trying to pretend that he has literally any concern for the well-being of people in developing countries who may be affected by the slowing down of economies.
That's a topic that we can discuss, and I will get into it here in a minute.
But Alex has absolutely no right to pretend to care here at all.
Prior to supporting Trump, Alex staked his claim very aggressively in supporting Ron Paul, the only honest politician, in his 2008 and 2012 runs for the presidency.
One of the big things that Ron Paul believed in was the elimination of all U.S. foreign aid.
The number of deaths that would result from that kind of a move is incalculable.
And it's not even taking into account the hits that developing countries would take in terms of their educational capacity or general sanitation programs.
The staggering level of cruelty that you have to accept to endorse a candidate who wants to get rid of all U.S. foreign aid precludes you from ever being able to credibly pretend you give a shit about anybody in the developing world.
The number that Alex is citing, about 30 million people being on the brink of risk of starvation, that's not a number that, you know, how many people are predicted to starve if we don't reopen our economy.
Our economy has nothing to do with that figure really at all, at least on a one-to-one level.
This is something that was put out by the UN World Food Program, who warned that we're looking at a very serious world food problem that has the potential to leave millions at risk if we don't do something.
This was something that their executive director, David Beasley, was warning about even before the coronavirus situation was here.
The issue is that there's a whole lot of issues happening right now.
To quote an ABC News article about Beasley's comments, quote, it's because of wars in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, locust swarms in Africa, frequent natural disasters and economic crises, including in Lebanon, Congo, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
There is an element to this that does involve our economy and other countries' economies, inasmuch as if we can't afford to provide foreign aid to the countries that are facing famine conditions, then there will end up being severe humanitarian crises, and a lot of people could die.
This is a very serious issue that deserves attention, but make no mistake about this.
Alex doesn't want our economy to be open so we can send money and foreign aid distributed by the UN.
Alex is using the abstract idea of the deaths of people in developing countries as a prop for his narratives, and it's legitimately disgusting.
This has nothing to do with whether or not Trump tells people to go to gyms or not.
This has to do with whether or not we deprioritize people in developing countries when things get tough at home.
That's the central question as it relates to the matter of people going hungry around the world.
And again, Alex's hero, Ron Paul, would happily let them all die.
So I guess if Alex actually cares about this at all, he'll call on Trump to provide increased funding to the UN World Food Program.
I challenge him to do that, but I suspect he won't because this is a game to him.
And the idea of 30 million dead people in foreign countries in the developing world is just a prop that he can use to argue in order for the economy to reopen so these companies, these large companies that he pretends to be opposed to can make a profit.
If a millionaire pretends to give a shit about anybody in a developing country, they should have their money taken away from him and be tarred and feathered.
I think that would be the way to solve most problems.
That's a side issue to the more important one that is Alex's bullshit.
It's like, yes, this is a real thing.
And you know what?
There are people who are talking about this.
Alex is pretending that no one cares.
You know who cares?
People in the fucking UN world food program.
The people who are actually on the ground working to avert this humanitarian crisis.
Not people like Alex blowing hard on the radio about how he doesn't like his show and he wants to fucking quit and run away to a redoubt, but no, I'm going to stay here forever.
So as this episode ends, Alex descends into a bit of a situation where he's reiterating and really hitting harder these narratives about how doctors are just fucking no one's in the hospitals.
Doctors are just drinking and fucking the hospitals are empty.
Again, this is just based on things that his dumb friends are saying.
I also don't think that that's necessarily true.
I would suspect that this is mostly about like he might have seen like a TikTok video of nurses dancing somewhere and assumed like, oh, they're all dancing everywhere.
And then he's just filled in the blanks and tried to apply like, oh, I talked to all these doctors and they said it's all just an orgy.
It does seem like he maybe is making that mistake kind of regularly.
Yeah.
I'm still of the mind that it's misspeaking and it doesn't mean anything, but it is weird.
It's more consistent than it appeared to be originally.
But yeah, so he's, you know, I mean, the whole thing about like delighting in the idea of these nurses and medical professionals dying, begging for mommy is gross.
But more importantly to me, I think, is this admission at the end here.
Didn't take all the calls that I said I was going to take.
Because I had a freak out in the middle of the show and I had to be really defensive about how I don't want just money and also I hate my show and the world deserves to burn.
And then I got to talking to and came back on air and said, hey, sorry about that.
I feel like it's okay for you to say that, but if I heard a doctor say that, I would be offended.
Because I think that doctors and medical professionals, and this is true from a number that I've spoken to and some friends that I have who are in the field, there's a calling to being that you have to sort of take away your ego or whatever feelings you have about like, this is a bad person.
The story that's so big he's choking and not being dramatic for sure.
It's a story that he covered the day before about 30 million people dying in developing countries at risk, or people not dying necessarily, but at risk of starvation.
So the Globe and Mail article that Alex is talking about is a week old when he's here on air.
It's from April 15th, and it just covers the same issues we talked about earlier.
Also, if Alex's argument is that the globalists want to shut the economy down in order to kill off all these people, which seems to be what he's getting at, he's going to have to contend with this quote from the UN World Food Program executive director, David Beasley, from that very Globe and Mail article that he's citing as a source.
Quote, if we lost our funding, a minimum 30 million would die.
Over a three-month period, that would be 300,000 people dying per day.
That's why leaders have got to balance out the COVID response with keeping the economy going because otherwise a lot more people will die from starvation and economic deterioration than from COVID itself.
So the UN simultaneously wants to crash the economy to punish Trump and are advocating that we balance keeping some of the economy going so we can provide aid to the developing world.
Seems like maybe the first one is just Alex's paranoid imagination.
So I start talking, and people come out of the store and they go, Oh, Alex Jones or Shea Man.
They go, Yeah, it's all a fraud.
Did you see John Roberts today saying it's 0.1% dying?
And I said, Yeah, that's what a lot of the numbers are showing.
We'll go over that in a moment.
It's beyond bombshell.
So there were the three people in the liquor store coming out when I'm arguing with a guy who's telling me from 30, 40 feet away, hey, put your mask on.
Because he thought I was coming in the liquor store.
And so I started trying to show the guy the video.
The folks who will find a way to profit off spears.
Yeah.
So, in that clip where he was talking about fighting a guy, yelling at a guy in a liquor store parking lot, Alex mentioned this video of John Roberts of Fox News talking about the coronavirus death rate.
And it has to do with a study from USC.
And we'll get into that here in a second.
And this is the other candidate for the big news that was making Alex choke.
So, like I said, I think this might be the big news.
It's a story that he's covering a lot on this episode, and there's kind of two aspects to it.
One is bullshit, and the other is misrepresentation.
The bullshit part is that it all boils down to a video that someone captured of Fox News's John Roberts talking to New York Times photographer Doug Mills before one of these White House press briefings.
The video has been used to present the idea that the virus and the response to it is a hoax.
Even though if you watch the video, Mills says, quote, so it's a hoax, to which Roberts replies, quote, no, I don't think it's a hoax.
This video has been used by all manner of conspiracy theorists.
The big narrative has been that Mills accidentally slipped up and admitted that there's a secret vaccine.
Roberts says that Mills doesn't need to wear his mask because the fatality rate is lower than we thought, to which Mills replies, quote, oh, yeah, we've all been vaccinated.
It's clear that there are friends fucking around.
And even when reached for comment, Roberts even said, like, that was just gallows humor.
Yeah.
To Alex's credit, he's not selling the vaccine portion of this video.
He's interested only in the lower fatality rate part of it, which was John Roberts discussing the misrepresented part of Alex's narrative.
Roberts was bringing up a study conducted by USC that reached a conclusion that there may be as many as 400,000 people in LA County who have had coronavirus.
This study has yet to be peer-reviewed, but if it stands to scrutiny, all it really shows is that there may be a much lower fatality rate in L.A. County than we currently knew to be the case.
Most people had assumed that the numbers we had weren't fully accurate for California because relative to other states, they've had other states that have had high numbers of cases.
There hasn't been as much widespread testing in the state.
It could well be that the number of people who have had the virus in the state is higher than the confirmed number, but I don't really see how that makes the outbreak any less serious.
It possibly puts California's fatality rate into a lower range, but that's about it.
Also, given the lower proportion of tests administered in California, it's also possible that the death numbers that we have for the state are lower than accurate.
There's a lot of assessment and study that needs to be done here to get a completely clear picture of what's what.
And this study is interesting, but we need to see what happens with it moving forward.
Once that happens, I'll assess things once they're more concrete, because unlike Alex, I don't base my beliefs on preliminary studies.
There very well may end up being, this could be a situation where this is good and it's a well-done study, but there's plenty of examples in the past where things appeared to be some way, and then it turns out, oh, no, here's a problem with this.
This is their globalist revolution to cut the carbon, to kill the industrial state, to make you poor and to make you austere.
This is their admitted plan, and they're all over the news.
The Pope says, we are dying because we're evil.
We deserve this.
Capitalism is wasteful.
The earth is doing this.
You're hearing the whole UN, Gaia, world government speech that we deserve this from the Hollywood and everybody else that are the same ones saying shut everything down to save lives.
See, I realize now that that's why I feel I don't.
We need to pay for what we've done, actually.
We are filth.
We are cowards.
We are trash.
And so all the yuppies wearing their mask and all the trendies getting into it, they're going to have everything they have taken and they're going to starve to death.
And it's good.
Look, I didn't mean the things I said last second.
Can you imagine what would be happening if Hillary Clinton was president today?
They would be carrying out this exact same plan, except it'd be 10 times worse because you wouldn't have Trump in there trying to block it, trying to reason with the American people to not be hysterical and to not give into the fear, but they didn't do that.
So the president then had to ride the wave or he would have been destroyed.
According to the World Economic Forum, quote, some oil producers, hoping to maintain their market share, have taken to storing their excess oil at sea, leasing tankers at high costs.
Some are believed to be paying in excess of $100,000 per day for each tanker.
Another compounding factor is that Alberta oil, which is produced from oil sands, is no longer profitable to produce.
It costs more to extract and transport it than it would to sell for, which has caused people to flee from it as a commodity.
According to the Financial Times, this will, quote, not on its own cause significant damage to the U.S. energy sector.
However, they note that it could hurt the perception that oil is a safe investment.
Based on their assessment, the solution is fairly simple.
We need to either slow production of oil, start using a ton more of it, or find places to store the oil we're currently producing.
Unless we do one of those things, the supply and demand will be out of balance, and we'll just keep seeing volatile pricing.
It's a bad situation, and one that could cause some potentially troubling ripples, but honestly, it could also provide the political will to finally do something about the deep-seated problems in the U.S. energy market.
It seems like there could barely be a better time to start making moves towards alternative energy models, since an incident like this demonstrates the benefits of not being so concerned with a single commodity that can blow up overnight.
Seems like it seems almost like there is a silver lining to an incident like this.
So Alex talks here about how he knows that these globalists, their eugenics cult, and he's known this for a really long time because back in the 60s, they were trying to get all the smart kids by 1966 in places like University of Texas.
You have to really recognize how much stuff Alex believes and repeats, pretending to come from authoritative sources and things that are proven, are just bullshit that his dad probably told him.
So, but when you look for backup for all this sort of stuff, like, you know, Alex has his standard examples, and one of them he pulls out all the time is Bill Joy's article in Wired magazine, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.
In this next clip, when Alex brings up Bill Joy's article, I get a little sense that Alex is keenly aware that he's actually just talking about the Unibomber.
I think he absolutely understands that he's just talking about the Unibomber.
There's no other reason for Alex to connect those thoughts.
And it's a sad attempt to justify using Bill Joy's article dishonestly.
Also, Ted Kaczynski was not in the CIA.
The psychological experiments that he was part of when he was at Harvard were administered by Henry Murray, who consulted with the Office of Strategic Services, which would later become the CIA, during World War II.
So in this next clip, Alex talks about the big plan with this crashing oil and crashing the economy.
Of course, it all fits into his model of the way that the Rothschild, Nathan Rothschild, did his crashing of the English economy in order to buy it all up.
They're just doing that again.
So Alex tells this story.
And again, this story is not true.
But listen to how passionately he tells this story.
They're scared of the fact the economy's going down.
So China starts showing the people with the chemical sprays again and all the fear and all the drones and blocking people up and going, oh, there's at least 30 strains.
Some of them are deadlier than before.
Just like Scooby-Doo.
The bad guys want to take the country over.
They want to drive the stock market down to 5%, buy it all up.
Just like Scooby-Doo.
Battle of Waterloo in 12 in 1815.
And Lord Wellington really just beat Napoleon for the second time.
It was the Battle of Waterloo.
They sent carrier pigeons to the coast, had fast Corvette, not by Chevy, that's named after a fast ship, haul ass across the channel, and they ran in right as the stock market over in London and said, Wellington annihilated.
And the stocks went to 1%.
Lord Rothschild bought them all and became supreme ruler of the British Empire.
He presents it in a different way and like this whole narrative about it.
What he knows is this anti-Semitic propaganda surrounding the Rothschild family and this the Battle of Waterloo that was used by Nazis by their films they put out during World War II.
So in this next clip, Alex talks about this John Roberts of Fox News angle and it has to do with the idea that what happened there was that they revealed that the media knows that this is a hoax.
So Alex thinks he seems to think that people are not getting resuscitated at hospitals.
Like if you go to a hospital now, too busy fucking.
Right.
Yeah.
And this leads into some pretty weird conspiracy theories about financial motivations that hospitals have for playing along with this hoax or whatever.
They said, oh, when it gets bad and 3 million people die in the United States, we're going to stop resuscitating people that have heart attacks, whether they be 50 years old or 80 years old, because we need the hospital space.
Well, now they admit that the hospitals are three times emptier than they've ever been in the last 50 years.
The National Health Service reports they're four times more empty than ever.
Empty.
But now, when you have a heart attack, just like Venezuela, they don't resuscitate you because that's non-essential.
And you're non-essential.
And I was looking the numbers up.
Bet a guest on talking about this, and I didn't even know this.
You get four.
In fact, I even pulled the article up a few nights ago when David Ike said.
I didn't know that.
The feds give a hospital, if someone doesn't have coverage, $4,000 for pneumonia, $40,000 for COVID-19.
So there's two pieces in that clip that are complete bullshit.
The first is that when Alex heard people talking about doctors not being able to help every patient and having to decide who gets care and who doesn't, which he seems to be making a joke out of, it wasn't a discussion about things that are happening now in the United States.
It was a horrifying glimpse at what could happen if our medical system was overwhelmed by the number of coronavirus patients that were coming into the hospital.
It's a pretty simple dynamic to understand.
If the number of people requiring immediate care is greater than the number of people who can provide said care, the care providers will have to decide who to help.
In that situation, you enter a nightmare where you have to write off people who are probably going to die because you can't save everyone.
This conversation wasn't happening for no reason.
It was because back in March, that's exactly the situation doctors in Italy were in.
From an article in Politico, quote, in an interview that went viral after it was published in the Italian daily, Corriere della Serra, Monday, Christian Salaroli, an anesthesiologist from a hospital in Bergamo, recounted scenes of wartime triage where old patients have to be left by the wayside.
Quote, the choice is made inside of an emergency room used for mass events where only COVID-19 patients enter.
If a person is between 80 and 95 and has severe respiratory failure, he probably won't make it.
Also from the article, quote, for now, the marching orders are save scarce resources for the patients who have the greatest chance of survival.
That means prioritizing younger, otherwise healthy patients over older patients or those with pre-existing conditions.
An article in the AP discusses what that looked like in real life and quotes Marco Resta, the deputy chief of Paulic Linico San Donato's intensive care unit.
Discussing how doctors have to decide who will get access to newly opened intensive care beds, the article says, quote, even if there is no chance, he says, you have to look a patient in the face and say, all is well, and this lie destroys you.
It's horrifying to consider.
And a few weeks later, doctors in Spain were dealing with the exact same horrors.
A March 25th article in Bloomberg discusses a Madrid emergency room.
Quote, people are dying in waiting rooms before they can be admitted as the coronavirus pandemic overpowers medical staff.
With some funeral service halted in the Spanish capital and no space left in the morgue, corpses are being stored in the main ice rink.
The conversation was not happening because this was something that was happening in the United States, but because it was a horror that our kin in other countries were living through, which could easily be our reality too if we made the wrong decisions.
The entire point of the distancing and masks and carefulness measures is for every one of us to do whatever we can to make sure we don't end up in that situation, because once we're there, that's when doctors cannot help you if you have a heart attack.
This is when our medical system has all its resources completely depleted by one pressing emergency and everything else is automatically a lower priority.
If we do these things, we help make sure that situation is one we never have to live through.
If you have a heart attack now, our hospitals will be able to help you, largely because of people doing the things that Alex is actively protesting against.
If he gets his way with his dumb rallies against distancing measures and all that shit, there's a chance we will end up in the nightmare scenario that he pretends to be fighting against.
As for that payments thing, that's just something that David Icke told Alex.
But David Icke was just repeating bullshit he heard on Fox News.
Minnesota State Senator Scott Jensen was on the Laura Ingram show and said, quote, anytime healthcare intersects with dollars, it gets awkward.
Right now, Medicare has determined that if you have COVID-19 admission to a hospital, you get paid $13,000.
If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000, three times as much.
From there, the conspiracy world started revving their engines, and it was decided that hospitals had a financial incentive in calling everything COVID-19.
Factcheck.org reached out to Jensen, who told them, quote, he did not think that hospitals were intentionally misclassifying cases for financial reasons, but it hardly matters.
The kernel of the idea had been presented.
And once that happens, it doesn't matter if the guy who presented it said, I didn't mean it like that.
It doesn't matter.
It has a life of its own.
FactCheck reached out to some doctors to get a sense of what this was all about.
And as it turns out, it's bullshit.
This is just the amount that Medicare pays for treatment of COVID-19, not diagnosis.
But according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, these numbers are very much in line with normal non-COVID payments from Medicare, with respiratory infections averaging about $13,000.
And in cases that escalate to the need for ventilators, it comes in around $40,000.
The Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act, which Trump signed into law, did give a 20% uptick in funds for Medicare patients who are treated for COVID-19.
But it's strange credulity to think that hospitals are just going to be fraudulently diagnosing people with the virus for a small bump in Medicare funds.
If they're caught doing that, they run the risk of being removed from the Medicare program entirely, leaving aside how they could be sued or charged with criminal malpractice.
Yeah, I mean, it's where it intersects with like foundational freedoms that we've not considered the limits of for a very long time.
You know, we haven't really had that conversation.
Whereas other countries in Europe, for instance, have these real limitations like Holocaust denial being illegal in Germany, where you recognize that your free speech rights are not absolute.
When there are real like solid consequences for the things that you say, you know, we understand that in terms of like you can punch the air freely, but if I punch you, it's assault.
The consequences do matter in terms of the action.
And I don't know.
I'm not sitting here saying that I support total revamping of our understanding of free speech, but I don't think that the conversation is necessarily unwarranted.
It's possible that the perspective you're bringing is accurate.
Right.
Now, that being said, we're not having a full understanding.
Like, we're not having a full conversation of it that takes into account the side unintended consequences of what you're advocating.
Because it's very possible that you pull the thread a little bit and you start to realize, well, there might be more severe consequences from that than you're realizing.
I'm not saying that I have the plan to solve it, but there is no way that we can look at what's going on right now and say we've done the best we could do.
So this is a great example of why I really just don't care for Alex much.
So there is a New York Post article with the headline, quote, New York issues do not resuscitate guidelines for cardiac patients amid coronavirus.
This was about an order that was floated that told emergency workers to not bother reviving someone if they arrive and that person doesn't have a pulse.
Previously, the standard was to try for, quote, up to 20 minutes to revive people.
This article cites an approximately 3% to 4% success rate in resuscitating patients that have no pulse when EMTs arrive, which is a small number, but definitely not an insignificant one.
This headline was from an article from April 21st.
By the time Alex is on air here on April 22nd, there's another article in the New York Post with the headline, quote, New York scraps do not resuscitate order during coronavirus pandemic.
I know this article came out before Alex got on air because I checked timestamps.
And if he's covering this story, he has every reason to be aware of this update.
Paramedics unions were not happy with this guidance and they pushed back and the order was reversed.
The conversation about whether or not it's necessary for New York EMTs to conserve their resources to the extent of not spending 20 minutes trying to resuscitate patients they find without a pulse, that's decidedly above my pay grade and I don't know.
But here's the situation from where I'm sitting: Alex is complaining about a problem that has already been solved by the time he's discussing it.
He's misrepresenting an already solved problem.
This is a perfect encapsulation of much of his career.
But look, the real thing is like in this next clip, as Alex is talking about this, it becomes clear that the only thing he's taking this from is his family members telling him this, which I don't trust.
So the function of this that Alex is taking from these very dubious places, this information.
The function of it is to argue that these medical workers, like the ones you saw standing in the crosswalk opposing these protesters, these Alex Jones-y ass protesters, the reason that they are fighting back against the open the country back up folks is because they're having too much fun fucking.
But there are people listening to Alex who are saying to themselves, that sounds true, which means they think the entire medical profession is willing to do a global hoax.
Sacrifice everybody's fucking life so they can fuck in a hospital.
I don't believe that the 22nd is nearly as interesting as the 21st.
There's a little bit of stuff in it.
And I might not have really been as interested in covering it because the psychodrama on the 21st is certainly far more interesting to me.
Alex is just like, he also, one of the reasons that I decided to include both of these episodes is because you can see how different his mood is from day to day.
On the next day, just in Fox's users coming in, hitting the clock, accusing doctors of having this conspiracy where they just want to fuck and are scamming Medicare money.
So now Bill Barr has said something that Alex likes.
So it looks like he's a good guy.
How fun is this game?
Who could forget Alex's show from February 14th when he and Steve Pieczenik were begging for Trump to fire William Barr because Barr had come out to say that Trump tweeting things about the DOJ's recommendation for Roger Stone's trial and sentencing was not cool.
They were on the warpath.
And Alex even went so far as to bring up the fact that there is a Jeffrey Epstein connection with William Barr.
We know that Attorney General Barr has really come out against the president.
Some people are saying that it's elaborate theater kabuki and that it's to get Democrat heat off the Attorney General for saying don't senate stone to an exorbitant amount of time.
The list of reasons why Alex should super fucking hate William Barr is a very long one.
ProPublica reported back on April 15th that Barr was specifically blocking 9-11 victims' families from access to FBI files that Trump had, quote, promised to open, saying that even discussing why he can't release these files would be a threat to national security.
For someone like Alex, who made his career on 9-11 conspiracy theories, this should sound a whole lot like someone engaging in a cover-up.
But he's Trump's attorney general, so Alex doesn't even bring the story up.
There's plenty of examples about this why Alex should hate him, but this one's particularly funny for me.
Alex's primary identity in his early career was a 9-11 truther, and that's being completely subjugated to his need to be a blind Trump follower.
It's really sad to see where this road he's on has led.
It's led to a repudiation and rejection of self.
Oh, also, William Barr was the attorney general under George H.W. Bush during the Ruby Ridge standoff, which is one of the earliest inciting incidents of the Patriot militia movement in the 90s.
In his questionnaire that he had to answer for his Trump confirmation, Barr says, quote, I spent approximately 80 hours organizing Amica briefs, including former attorneys general, to support an FBI sniper in defending against criminal charges in connection with the Ruby Ridge incident in Idaho.
I enlisted a law firm to work pro bono on the case and assisted in framing legal arguments advanced in the Amica in the district court and the subsequent appeal in the Ninth Circuit.
That sniper that he helped defend was the person who shot Randy Weaver's wife while she was holding her infant child.
William Barr should be a villain of the highest order to Alex, but fuck that noise.
He's down with Trump and he recently said something useful for Alex.
And for all the reasons that he needs to be off air for his own effect that he has on the public and how he's a danger to people, he also needs to be off air for his own good.
He is exactly the opposite of what he pretends to be.
He pretends to care about all these patriot right-wing world.
And even according to that, he's a fucking sell-out piece of shit.
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