Today, Dan and Jordan discuss the last few days of The Alex Jones Show. In this installment, Alex forces Dan to critically engage with the idea that his cannibalism rant was satire, and decides that a dumb op-ed is a revelation of the Globalists' plan for the 2020 election.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I have great respect for knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
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Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
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I'm Jordan. | |
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Let me ask you a quick question. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| Well, I mean, I just got to give a continuation of last time. | ||
| I realized that I could bake chicken breasts. | ||
| I went. | ||
| I got some chicken breasts. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| Still going? | ||
| Have you figured out breading yet? | ||
| Easiest fucking thing in the world. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| A world has opened up in front of me that I should... | ||
| This is something that most people probably experience at 20, 19, maybe right when they move out. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Maybe when they still live with their parents. | ||
| It can happen. | ||
| I did not have those milestones. | ||
| And it's really fascinating to me. | ||
| It's very exciting in some ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Last night for dinner, I made some chicken and rice. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it was fine. | ||
| It was marinated a bit. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| Just with some lemon pepper and whatever. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| All right. | ||
| Pretty basic, simple thing. | ||
| Not complicated. | ||
| So today for lunch, I tried to kick it up a little bit more, and I left it overnight last night in a bag with some soy sauce, chopped up garlic, and jalapeno. | ||
| And it was better. | ||
| But what I'm realizing is there's a whole world of marinades that I'm very excited to tinker with and explore. | ||
| I think my bright spots for the foreseeable future might end up with me cooking some stuff. | ||
| Also, in a couple days, I plan to make that lasagna finally. | ||
| Now that I have this boost of enthusiasm and feeling of a can-do spirit from cooking a chicken breast. | ||
|
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I like it. | |
| I like it. | ||
| The problem was, like, for so long, I thought, like I mentioned, that the only way you can really cook a chicken breast is, like, in a pan on top of the stove. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I would always burn them. | ||
| And so I got to the point where I was like, I can't do this. | ||
| It's for someone else. | ||
| Other people do that. | ||
|
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But I love a roasted chicken breast. | |
| Sure, sure, sure! | ||
| So now I know that I can do this and I'm very excited and my life has changed. | ||
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| Wait until you figure out that you can sear it on both sides in the pan to get a nice little crust and then bake it after that. | ||
| I've heard about this. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| I may explore that at some point in the future. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| That changed my life. | ||
| I don't want to put all my chickens in the same... | ||
| Pan? | ||
| Whatever the expression is that makes it a pun. | ||
| So I might only do some work on this front and then start to explore some other recipes that I now realize maybe I can do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So that's very exciting. | ||
| How about you? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I will tell you, I just had some white chocolate peanut M&Ms. | ||
| I was kind of thinking that might be what it is. | ||
| I was really struggling to come up with a bright spot, and then 20 minutes ago, while we were at the store, I finally had my first white chocolate M&M. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
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Delicious. | |
| Peanuts. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Very good. | ||
| I'm glad for you to enjoy this candy. | ||
| I thought it was good, not great. | ||
| What would it get on a seltzer? | ||
| It'd be over 50. I'm not putting it in the 70s, though. | ||
| I would give it a 63. That might be a prudent rating. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we've got an interesting episode to go over. | ||
| We're talking about May 3rd and 4th, 2020. | ||
| I'm Dan, this is 2020. | ||
| That's Sunday and Monday this week. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Some interesting stuff goes down. | ||
| Alex is very weird. | ||
| And, you know, he's got some problems. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And we'll get down to business on that. | ||
| But before we do, we've got to take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show and do an overdue seltzer report for the year of the seltzer. | ||
| So first, Hendo, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Hendo. | ||
| Next, Jason, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Jason. | ||
| Thanks, Jace. | ||
| I won't call you Jace. | ||
| Nobody calls anybody Jace. | ||
| Next, Nance. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Nance. | ||
| I wonder if that's short for Nancy. | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Next, Colin. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Colin. | ||
| Next, this is very exciting. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| One of my most feared enemies from Dynasty Warriors has signed up and is supporting the show. | ||
| Lou Boo? | ||
| Thank you so much, Lou Boo. | ||
|
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You are now a policy wonk. | |
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Lou Boo. | ||
| Next, Andrew J. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Andrew J. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, chicken bats run the world. | ||
| Who run the world? | ||
| Chicken bats. | ||
| Then finally, I'd like to say thank you to a couple people who signed up on an elevated level and we appreciate that very much. | ||
| So Jeff C., thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| And Will W., thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| Alright, we gotta go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, alright? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, Jeff C., and thank you so much, Will W. Yes, thank you very much to the both of you. | ||
| If you're out there listening and you're thinking, I enjoy the show, I'd like to support these gents, too. | ||
| You can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show, or you can find a local charity in your area that helps people in the community who are in need and throw the support that way. | ||
| Indeed, we would appreciate either. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| So, Jordan, like I said, you're the seltzer. | ||
| Quick report. | ||
| I failed to do one on the last episode, and part of the reason was I forgot, and another part of the reason was I kind of been slowing down a little bit. | ||
| Nothing stuck out to you. | ||
| Well, there's that, and I also was slowing down a tiny bit, and I realized one of the reasons was because I, the last time I'd gone to the grocery store, I stocked up on a bunch of the different flavors of... | ||
| Sparkling ice. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| And I do not like any of them. | ||
|
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Uh-uh. | |
| So there's a couple in my fridge that were waiting for me to be the next ones to try. | ||
|
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Ooh. | |
| And it just really became a hurdle to me being like, I don't want to do it. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| And by the way, I'm talking about the sparkling ice that has caffeine that comes in the like 16 ounce can. | ||
| Not the ones that are the slim plastic bottles. | ||
| There are like a thousand varieties of those. | ||
| I'm holding off on those because they're easily readily available. | ||
| They're all over the place. | ||
| And if I hit a wall and need to find more things to try, those sparkling ice in the bottles are everywhere. | ||
| They're on your back burner. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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These ones in the can seemed a little bit different. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
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They're terrible. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
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And so it kind of got to a point where it was like, well, if I want something... | |
| I had little to bring to the table. | ||
|
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Although... | |
| Because we had a good head start, we're still on track for the 500. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We are at 27 currently. | ||
| 27 seltzers. | ||
| We need to be at 30 by the end of this week. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which we still have plenty of time on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'll say... | ||
| I like how you're saying we. | ||
| I feel like we're all in this together. | ||
| I'm talking about you. | ||
| I'm talking about me. | ||
| I'm talking about the audience. | ||
|
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All the wonks? | |
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I've been getting a number of tweets of people with pictures of cans of seltzer. | ||
| And by the way, my definition of seltzer, admittedly rangy. | ||
| And I want to say this. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Is some of this stuff technically not seltzers? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Anything carbonated, I feel like it's a seltzer. | ||
| No, because I'm not going to go... | ||
| Not a soda. | ||
| Not a soda. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's that Supreme Court definition of pornography. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| I know a seltzer when I see it. | ||
| Yeah, I gotcha. | ||
| Thanks, Tipper Gore. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| I should have just called it fizzy water. | ||
| I should have just said the year of fizzy water, but I said seltzer. | ||
| And even if it's incorrect, we're sticking with it. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| But I got to say, in terms of a bright spot, I've given them a shout out before. | ||
| I got to say bubbler. | ||
| B-U-B-B-L-E, no E, R, just apostrophe R. I've now had all of them, all of their varieties, flavors, and they're all pretty good. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| They have a pretty solid consistency. | ||
| I hadn't tried them before this adventure, and I don't know if any of them rated below a really admirable rating. | ||
| The last one I tried this week was a cherry guava blender. | ||
| What's the name of it? | ||
| That sounds terrible. | ||
| I got a 76. Wow! | ||
| Yeah, 76 out of 100. | ||
| I thought it was fantastic. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It was really good. | ||
| It broke the 75 threshold. | ||
|
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Interesting. | |
| Yeah, it was pretty special. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Yeah, so Bubbler, I will no longer be shouting them out at all. | ||
| Not a sponsor. | ||
| But also, I've tried all of them now, so there is no more to try. | ||
| But as we finish the Bubbler chapter, I just want to make it known. | ||
| I've enjoyed all of them, except for maybe the Blood Orange. | ||
| What was that one? | ||
| Some blood orange something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was mixed with something. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| It was fine, but it just wasn't as good as the others. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Cranberry something or other. | ||
| I'm telling you, Bubbler, if you guys want to continue getting this level of free publicity, you better make up some new flavors real quick. | ||
| Otherwise, you're not going to get the knowledge fight bump. | ||
| Well, I mean, if they did, I would be excited to try them. | ||
| Of course you would. | ||
| There was also the Pattaya Berry Nectar that came in at 73. That was a solid one. | ||
| That's good? | ||
| That's good? | ||
| That's a dragon fruit. | ||
| That's what a Pattaya is, apparently. | ||
| Pomegranate acai. | ||
| That came in in the mid-60s. | ||
| What was the other one? | ||
| The Passion Fruit Wonder. | ||
| 78. 78 on the Passion Fruit Wonder. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| That was part of my rediscovery of Passion Fruit. | ||
|
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Gotcha. | |
| So anyway, thank you so much, Bubbler, for having some fine products for me to enjoy at the beginning of this year-long adventure. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| There's going to be a slog in a couple of months for sure. | ||
| You're going to have a real... | ||
|
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Maybe tomorrow. | |
| That's possible. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| So this has been the Year of the Self. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| So, Jordan, we got this Sunday-Monday swing to get through to explore. | ||
| But before we get to that, I want to check in on a little bit of important news that's happening in the increasingly sad world of Alex Jones that does not come up on his show. | ||
| The big news that broke recently was that Alex's main lawyer in his Sandy Hook case, Norm Pattis, withdrew from representing Alex on Monday. | ||
| Simultaneously, Alex's other lawyer in that case, Chris Latronica, who also worked with Pattis, also filed a motion to withdraw as his counsel. | ||
| According to the Connecticut Post, quote, it's unclear who will now represent Jones. | ||
| This is really bad news for Alex, and I think there's only a few possible explanations for what's going on. | ||
| The most likely is that Norm Pattis knows that Alex cannot pay him to continue representing him until the case begins jury selection in no situation. | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| Nobody's representing Alex Pro Bono. | ||
| Well, I mean, there might have been some sort of an arrangement between him and Barnes. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Because, by the way, I don't know if I brought this up, Barnes does have his own show on InfoWars now. | ||
| No, he does not. | ||
| I don't know if it's daily or what, but he does have his own show. | ||
| God damn it, Barnes. | ||
| Good work. | ||
| Good work. | ||
| So there might have been some sort of a payment in kind situation. | ||
| Publicity amplification, that sort of thing with him. | ||
| But he's not his lawyer anymore in the Sandy Hook stuff. | ||
| Mark Randazza isn't either. | ||
| Alex has gone through a number of folks who are all a little shady. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Lionel Hutz is dead, unfortunately. | ||
| Lionel Nation might not be past the bar in Connecticut. | ||
| Although Lionel... | ||
| Imagine the court... | ||
| Indie Hookcase starts and Lionel's theme song plays. | ||
| Lionel! | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| He's coming in from the back! | ||
| Alright, we're going to hold you to contempt. | ||
| I was just like, it was worth it. | ||
|
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Totally worth it. | |
| It would be worth it for me. | ||
| So, that's not good. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the big possibilities is that Norm knows that Alex can't pay for it. | ||
| Another possibility is that he just got to the point where he hates Alex so much that he doesn't want to represent him. | ||
| I think that's unlikely considering how much of a dick Alex was to him in the past that he put up with it. | ||
| So my big sense is that the financial aspect is a strong contender. | ||
| And then the other second strong contender that I have is that Norm might have realized that that case was going to end with Alex losing in humiliating fashion. | ||
| And he knew that it would be bad for his particular brand. | ||
| It's fun and profitable to be the firebrand rebel lawyer who's supporting Alex for his free speech until you have to make that argument in court and fail. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| To be the lawyer who's standing up for him while you're postponing things. | ||
| While you're saying, we're going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. | ||
| But until you have to make the arguments in front of a jury and a judge... | ||
| That's where you're left holding the bag, and that's where you look bad if you're a lawyer like Pattis. | ||
| So I think that this might just be a thing where it's like, we can't postpone this much longer. | ||
| There aren't more motions for us to make to dismiss. | ||
| I'm going to end up seeing the inside of this courtroom, and I can't do that. | ||
| I am not going to be in the inside of that courtroom. | ||
| I will never work again if I'm the guy who's trying to defend Alex on this shaky-ass ground. | ||
| So I think those are the most likely possibilities. | ||
| Although Norm hasn't commented on it, so there's a caveat. | ||
| There's a possibility there's an entirely other explanation. | ||
| Alex fucked his wife. | ||
| I'm not saying it's true. | ||
| I'm just saying that people are talking, Dan. | ||
| That's what I've been hearing. | ||
| Wait, you? | ||
| You've been talking? | ||
| I have been hearing many voices all around this great nation. | ||
| I saw several tweets about it just a week ago. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| So whatever the exact reason is that Norm withdrew, the reality is that Alex will now have to get a new lawyer to represent him. | ||
| And his options aren't great. | ||
| So even if Alex does find somebody else to take on the case, he's got to now completely get them up to speed. | ||
| It's a huge hit. | ||
| Norm leaving was a big... | ||
| Barnes leaving or not being his lawyer anymore was one thing because he had Barnes and Norm as a sort of tag team of lawyers. | ||
| Norm was his last sort of celebrity lawyer that was there. | ||
| Doesn't look good. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Who's... | ||
| Ooh, ooh, ooh. | ||
| The guy who hates Roger Stone. | ||
| Bring him back in. | ||
| Clayman? | ||
| Yeah, let's get Clayman in here. | ||
| Let's really fucking plumb the depths. | ||
| We need to go spelunking for how far we can go down. | ||
| You seem to forget that Clayman recently sued Alex and Roger. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's why it'd be genius. | ||
| I don't think that one's gonna happen. | ||
| But it might be one of the few people who are... | ||
| Of the inclination to take on Alex's case. | ||
| I look at it and I think the most likely thing is probably a combination of the money and the we're going to lose. | ||
| This isn't worth it for me anymore. | ||
| That's just my sense of it, but who knows? | ||
| Also, you can't be thrilled with Rob Dew's deposition. | ||
| It might just be a delayed effect of that deposition. | ||
| To me, it's probably like the money is part of it. | ||
| In such a way that the money now allows him to do what he's always wanted to do, which is kick Alex to the curb. | ||
| He's always hated Alex, but the money was too good. | ||
| Now that the money might be even shaky, it's like, finally, fuck you, man. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| So we're going to start here on the 3rd, May 3rd, Sunday's show. | ||
| Alex starts off a little bit... | ||
| Wobbly. | ||
| And he's talking about how the New World Order is going to bring in this absolute tyranny. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| But the problem is that there's some people who aren't going to go along with the plan, man. | ||
| Now, the problem is there will still be a large minority of Americans of every race, color, and creed that aren't going to go along with this. | ||
| But unless there is a giant awakening now and a total understanding of this fraud, we don't have a... | ||
| Snowballs chance in hell. | ||
| We woke the world up. | ||
| Globalism was in trouble. | ||
| Freedom brought prosperity. | ||
| We were turning the tide. | ||
| The Chinese spies were being arrested. | ||
| And then the deep state that actually set up the Communist Chinese, the Rockefeller Foundation, who actually ran the whole lockstep program with Bill and Melinda Gates. | ||
| I'm mentioning public programs to release a bioweapon and bring in martial law. | ||
| They're openly saying... | ||
| That they're going to forcibly inoculate you, and I told you this day one, Bill and Melinda Gates have already patented the vaccine for a weaponized chimera COVID-19. | ||
| It's already ready. | ||
| They just wanted to make you beg for it and plead for it so that it doesn't look super obvious they already have it ready, but they actually patented it two years ago. | ||
| Lockstep isn't a program, and all that other stuff is Alex just making shit up. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So, good. | ||
|
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Doing great. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So there is a bit of news that Alex gets to pretty early on that sounds like a lie, but appears to be based on something that's actually real, and I found this to be pretty scary. | ||
| I saw ABC News actually come out and report on the Unanimous Five Eyes saying that it was a bioweapon out of the Wuhan lab. | ||
| Now, we have the author of the U.S. Law on Bioweapons, the guy that prosecutes dictators, joining us at the start of the next hour. | ||
| He came out first in February here. | ||
| So, just real fast, Francis Boyle didn't prosecute any dictators in international court. | ||
| According to his own bio, he was, quote, involved in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic. | ||
| No shade on that, but it's not quite the same thing. | ||
| And Alex is still consistently doing the, he developed our law about bioweapons that then was... | ||
| Adopted by the international community as opposed to the inverse. | ||
| So this is honestly one of the most scary roads I've traveled down while looking into something for this podcast. | ||
| What Alex is talking about with the five eyes thing is something real, it appears. | ||
| But what it actually appears to be is terrifying. | ||
| Over the weekend, Fox News reported on an alleged research dossier that was said to have been put together by the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance. | ||
| This article on Fox is largely about this report being critical of Chinese actions over the course of the outbreak in terms of the lack of transparency and of China likely knowing more earlier than they claim to. | ||
| There's a good amount of discussion of the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it's also clear that, quote, no public evidence has yet been presented to definitively point to the lab scenario, and defense sources who have spoken to Fox News say it's being viewed as simply one of two theories about how the outbreak began. | ||
| The article is pretty explicit that no matter what theory is being believed, the lab or natural origin theory, quote, both scenarios are attributable to mistakes. | ||
| There's no malicious intent behind any of it. | ||
| In the Fox News story. | ||
| This Fox article is based on an article from the Daily Telegraph, a tabloid out of Australia. | ||
| The Daily Telegraph is owned by News Corp Australia, whose parent company is News Corp, who also own Fox News. | ||
| So these are tentacles of the same operation, really. | ||
| So it would probably be wise to view them as similar things. | ||
| In lockstep, if you will. | ||
| This Daily Telegraph article claims that they have the actual Five Eyes report, and while they did not publish it, the information they claim in it is absolutely terrifying, because it sounds like building a case. | ||
| Reading over this Telegraph article, there's some pretty big red flags. | ||
| Perhaps the biggest was a reference to the 2015 UNC Chapel Hill study that Alex... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That Alex uses as the pretend origin of the virus. | ||
| This article doesn't say that this is where COVID-19 was created, but the idea that it's a part of an intelligent assessment that's trying to build a case against China is incredibly scary. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| An article about this in foreign policy made me feel more worried, as it discussed this supposed intelligence report that was being touted in the media. | ||
| This article points out that three out of the five countries involved in the Five Eyes, Australia, the UK, and Canada, Keep in mind that Alex is specifically reporting this as unanimous, which it is not. | ||
| I hear a samba in the distance just gently saying, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, all over again. | ||
| Let's make up a reason to go to war! | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Which sucks. | ||
| Yeah, it's a bunch of papers from Alex's desk. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| They spoke with Jessica Davis, who was formerly a senior strategy analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. | ||
| From the article, quote, Davis said that by pumping up this theory in the media, the Trump administration appears to be trying to draw the five eyes into it. | ||
| Quote, I don't envy my Canadian former colleagues, Davis said. | ||
| To come out and contradict the White House position is bad politics for the other five eyes countries, she said. | ||
| But then to let it stand is also unpalatable because then you're being used as a tool of American politicization. | ||
| It's almost like they did that on purpose. | ||
| I can't say this with any certainty, but this appears to me to be an attempt to point a finger at China by using crowdsourced theories about the origins of the coronavirus. | ||
| I hope it's not, and this is just some kind of unfortunate misreporting by the Telegraph, but if it's not, I'm seriously worried about how this all could play out. | ||
| It would represent the first time I can think of that Infowars conspiracy theories made their way into a government intelligence report. | ||
| Which makes me shudder. | ||
| No, it's totally great that Mike Pompeo came out on national television and said it was probably China's fault and it was a bioweapon. | ||
| And the follow-up questions were, do you have any evidence? | ||
| And the answer was, no, not at all. | ||
| It's probably not a bioweapon. | ||
| But somehow the media still reports it as, it's great. | ||
| It's just great, Dan. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| It's just great. | ||
| For people who read headlines, the way to go with that is definitely Mike Pompeo says that it's China's fault, not... | ||
| Mike Pompeo lies to our fucking faces with no information. | ||
| That's the way to go if you're writing a headline. | ||
| Yeah, we need some real serious proof about these sorts of things. | ||
| These conversations are happening at this level. | ||
| Because you're playing with fire. | ||
| You're absolutely like... | ||
| You risk getting involved in a situation that we're in way over our heads. | ||
| And the ramifications of it could be unthinkable. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| So Alex complains in this next clip that he's been right about Fauci and how they sold the virus to China and all this stuff all along. | ||
| And because of it, he's got a tail on him. | ||
| Now, we told you that exactly as it happened. | ||
| Precisely as it happened. | ||
| Not just, oh, I bet Fauci's involved. | ||
| Oh, we said the exact virus, the chimera, showed you the white papers, did dozens of shows on it. | ||
| And it got the FBI following me around. | ||
| I mean, that's that. | ||
| Fine, whatever. | ||
| I mean, that's what goes on in this country. | ||
| So they're getting ready to General Flynn me. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| You can't stop all Americans. | ||
| So let's continue. | ||
| They're getting ready to General Flynn. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I want to turn that into a verb for sure. | ||
| I mean, I think what you have here is the continuation of legend building in terms of whenever this all comes to pass, whenever his consequences catch up with him. | ||
| The FBI has been following me around, man! | ||
| I could also see that being a private investigator. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, he put out a private investigator on his current wife. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's how she got a DUI. | ||
| He had someone following her around. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe someone's following him around. | ||
| Yeah, and there's so many lawsuits currently out against him. | ||
| It wouldn't be the first time that a lawyer has hired a private investigator, so yeah, fuck it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Yeah, that's a possibility. | ||
| I mean, we can't... | ||
| Concretely say that it's as likely that it is that as it is that he's just making this up in order to continue the narrative that allows the end of his career to be a noble thing or something. | ||
| What's not happening is an FBI agent following him. | ||
| I would find that hard to believe. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex takes something that he probably saw on maybe one of his employees' Twitters and reports it as news. | ||
| We've got... | ||
| The fraud articles where they're just openly admitting that the CDC's numbers are half of what the media is announcing. | ||
| Really, there's only 37,000 deaths, and that's with the inflated numbers. | ||
| That's like a yearly flu. | ||
| So this was a story that was making the rounds on social media that the CDC had come out and admitted that instead of over 60,000 deaths in the United States from the virus, the number was actually 37,308. | ||
| We got him! | ||
| This claim was taken and repeated over and over again on Facebook and Twitter, with no one bothering to check the data where it came from. | ||
| This was from the CDC's, quote, provisional death counts for COVID-19 tracker. | ||
| And it's something real that is up on the CDC's website, but there's something important to remember here, and it's something that I've brought up in the past a number of times. | ||
| The CDC's website is not the most up-to-date or helpful website. | ||
| That's not necessarily a knock on them, it's just that their process doesn't cater to up-to-the-minute reporting, and they're perfectly upfront about it. | ||
| The page that these claims are taken from says very clearly, Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. | ||
| Our counts often track one to two weeks behind other data for a number of reasons. | ||
| The reasons listed are, quote, And other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths. | ||
| They further go on to say that, quote, Provisional death counts are not final and subject to change. | ||
| From the very webpage that's being used as a source, the best claim that you can make is that the numbers there are a picture of what is probably about two weeks behind, possibly a glimpse into how things looked two weeks ago. | ||
| If you look at other trackers like worldometers, you can check what the total death count was two weeks ago, and it's pretty close to 37,000, so that kind of makes sense. | ||
| In two weeks, we can check back on the CDC's site and see what they have up, but for now, this is in no way an instance of the CDC cutting their numbers in half, as Alex is reporting. | ||
| To a naive listener... | ||
| Alex is reporting on hard research news. | ||
| But if you have any idea about the subject he's covering, you'd know that all he's doing is blindly regurgitating viral right-wing content that's factually inaccurate, which is all he's ever done. | ||
| It used to be drudge headlines, and now it's idiocy one of his interns found on 4chan or Twitter. | ||
| That's what his show is in terms of information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's a war on it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it is. | ||
| It's a war on information. | ||
| You might say that. | ||
| It's not an information war. | ||
| It's a war on information. | ||
| Destroy it. | ||
| Reality is nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Very, very fitting name, perhaps. | ||
| So Alex has another article. | ||
| This one's about the election. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| We've got that. | ||
| And then, of course, you didn't just hear this here first. | ||
| You heard this here. | ||
| Oh, here we go. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| For Hillary to run, but Obama to be her VP. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I recall that a lot of the conversation was about Michelle Obama running back when Roger Stone was saying this was the inside baseball before he got arrested. | ||
| Calm it down, guys. | ||
| So this is just Alex reading a headline of an op-ed in The Hill that literally has in its header, quote, The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill. | ||
| The headline is, quote, A Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket to replace Joe Biden? | ||
| Is it even possible? | ||
| It's a fantastical opinion piece where the writer is suggesting that if Biden drops out of the race, what would happen? | ||
| For one thing, it doesn't seem to mention that Bernie won nine primaries this election Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's literally nothing behind this op-ed other than one person's fantasy booking of the election. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this op-ed was written by Douglas McKinnon, and it would be wise to consider that his bio is included at the end of the article. | ||
| Quote, Douglas McKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. | ||
| It would also be good to know a little bit about who the guy is before you take this without a grain of salt. | ||
| I don't need to know anything more than writer for Reagan and H.W. Bush. | ||
| That got it all for me. | ||
| It's not a good bit of a resume for him to be spouting nonsense about the Democratic candidates. | ||
| You know, you would think that, but I really do think that now is the time for us to listen to what Republicans have to say about what candidates we should elect. | ||
| They've got a great track record. | ||
| Jordan, you're way ahead of yourself. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You should be more mad at this guy and you don't even know it. | ||
| I want to hit him with a blackjack. | ||
| Already. | ||
| In 2014, McKinnon published a book titled, quote, The Secessionist States of America, The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country, dot dot dot, now. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| His book was legitimately a call for the South to re-secede, largely in response to rising acceptance of LGBTQ folk and create a new country to be ruled by extreme religious right principles, basically a fundamentalist Christian caliphate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| His proposed name for the new country was Reagan. | ||
| Which makes sense, given that he used to work for Reagan, and he's an idiot. | ||
| He wanted to name the country Reagan. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I really think somebody with ideas that bad needs to be kept somewhere safe. | ||
| Apparently, this country that he wanted to create would be Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina initially, and then he'd hope other states would get on board. | ||
| Alex would be disappointed to learn that he specifically left Texas out because, quote, there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some folks in Mexico. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Why would you want Texas in there? | ||
| Reagan has got to be a fucking armored... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Probably someone should tell him that Miami-Dade County in Florida is the second highest county in the United States in terms of an immigrant population after Los Angeles, and Broward County is number 10. Good to know, though, that his plan that was based on anti-LGBTQ... | ||
| Intolerance is also full of overt racism and xenophobia. | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking of another name. | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| I think they tried it one time before. | ||
| It was in Africa. | ||
| They took a whole swath of land from the native peoples there, kicked them out, and created a white nationalist. | ||
| What was the name of that, Dan? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I don't know if I've heard about this. | ||
| That's probably right. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| I bet this idea is brand new. | ||
| So McKinnon promoted his book on a right-wing radio show. | ||
| The Daily Caller. | ||
| On January 15th, 2020, he posted an article there titled, quote, The Red Sox fire Trump hating Alex Cora, giving him time to be a fan of Psst, psst. | ||
| It's because they really like yelling about Hillary and Obama! | ||
| And his goal is to stir shit up. | ||
| It's basically trolling that's been allowed to be published in The Hill, which they absolutely should not have done. | ||
| Thanks, The Hill! | ||
| It would be one thing if it was just a random person writing a column about whether or not it was constitutionally possible for Obama to run as a vice president. | ||
| It's another thing to publish this bullshit written by a dude who not six years ago... | ||
| Was writing a book encouraging states to secede from the country because he was mad about LGBTQ acceptance. | ||
| Did the Hill publish that one too? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Maybe they should have. | ||
| So anyway, my point is that I'm not taking this op-ed all that seriously. | ||
| But apparently Alex thinks that this dude writing this garbage is the equivalent of the globalists coming out and admitting that this Hillary Obama ticket is their plan. | ||
| Probably because Alex is dumb and lazy and the optics of this work for his narrative. | ||
| So, whatever. | ||
| I mean, that's borderline controlled opposition for Alex. | ||
| Kind of, yeah. | ||
| Like, he wrote that article so Alex could get mad about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's an alley-oop. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It really does seem like they're working together on this one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And the hill is fucking us all over. | ||
| Obviously not actually working together, but their means work together. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Whatever they're doing fit together like Lego blocks. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Perfectly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's very stupid. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| So early on in this episode, Alex decides that, you know, he needs to discuss the fact that everybody's talking about him talking about eating his neighbors. | ||
| So he gets into that here in this next clip. | ||
| But when we return, I'm going to respond to what was one of the biggest stories Friday and Saturday and what trended for two days. | ||
| Number one on Twitter. | ||
| Alex Jones will eat his neighbor's ass. | ||
| Thanks, everybody, by the way. | ||
| To spin that, that it was some sexual reference, because that's what's in their mind. | ||
| It was an allegory that I've brought up here a hundred times in the last few years. | ||
| One of my favorite essays. | ||
| A modest proposal. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I intended for them back on Tuesday to grab it and make a huge deal about it. | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| But then Friday, they did grab a hold of it. | ||
| And misrepresented exactly as I thought they would. | ||
| And so they took the bait beautifully on that. | ||
| And so now I've been able to have millions and millions of views on other videos we put out that have been picked up by newspapers where we talked about a modest proposal and how we could expose the absurdity of eating children to expose those that just say let the third world die. | ||
| I don't believe that this is actually accurate the way Alex is presenting it. | ||
| I do think that in the moment he was hoping that his dumb cannibalism outburst would get covered in the media and that he'd be able to translate it into a bunch of free press. | ||
| But I don't believe that there was any satire behind it or any plan to use it to bring attention to the hunger in the developing world. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| That's just the spin he's come up with once it was already trending and people were making fun of him. | ||
| It's a good spin. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I can't argue with that. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't work, but it's the best thing he could do given the circumstances. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I agree. | ||
| Ultimately, I do think that he's being sincere when he says that he thought it was a failed attempt to get attention after people didn't cover it on Tuesday and Wednesday. | ||
| This is why it's really important to view his outbursts through the correct prism. | ||
| When no one made fun of him, he considered the outburst a failure and a waste of time. | ||
| He didn't get what he wanted out of it. | ||
| Now, he can pretend that what he wanted out of it was more attention on the videos about world hunger issues to make this seem noble, but that's nonsense. | ||
| This was always about getting himself attention with the hopes of feeding more people into his revenue streams, and that's exactly what he got. | ||
| I am so mad. | ||
| He said that directly to us. | ||
| He waved his ass in our faces. | ||
| That's not true, because we are keenly aware of the things that he's saying already. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean that he said it so explicitly. | ||
| The exact thing of how it happened. | ||
| At least try and lie a little bit. | ||
| At least try and lie a little bit. | ||
| This isn't the first time he said, like, that worked exactly how I hoped it would. | ||
| I know, but come on, man. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| And I don't believe that in the moment he was, like, really, like, I'm going to get press out of this. | ||
| I think as soon as he went to commercial, he was like, man, I hope they cover that. | ||
| Take a clip, and I could pretend they're taking it out of context. | ||
| And then when it didn't happen, it is obviously disappointing, because that's just money on the table. | ||
| So, Alex talks a little bit about this rant, and I'd hoped not to talk about this more, but the more he talked about it, the more frustrated I got. | ||
| And we'll get, you know, you'll see why. | ||
| But just like on Joe Rogan, I talked about the modest proposal and the governor of Blackface of Virginia saying we need to keep the babies alive and harvest their organs. | ||
| And I said that's very Swiftian of him. | ||
| But he said, he really does that. | ||
| But it's OK that he kills babies. | ||
| I just talked about eating my neighbors. | ||
| I said, let's not kill babies. | ||
| Let's eat our neighbors. | ||
| They went, oh, he wants to kill his neighbors. | ||
| He didn't say, instead of killing babies, let me eat my neighbor. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| That was never a piece of the equation. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's a completely new element that he's added after the fact in order to try and make what he was saying make some sort of... | ||
| Ironic sense or whatever. | ||
| He's trying to add... | ||
| Literary layers to it in hindsight, and that's pretty abusive. | ||
| No, remember, what he was saying is that when we run out of food, I am going to trick my daughters into eating a human being. | ||
| By saying it's beef. | ||
| That was not a heroic act. | ||
| We're going to get to it. | ||
| That was only a part of it. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| We're going to talk about this way more than I want to. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| So Alex, when he comes back from break, he does get into this more, and he starts talking about some of the actual press that he got. | ||
| Here's Forbes. | ||
| Please don't eat your neighbor. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What Alex Jones said is so dangerous. | ||
| They go on to say, he is commanding the people in Michigan who stormed the Capitol, they may start eating people. | ||
| You talk about satire, but they're writing this as serious. | ||
| So that Forbes article does not say that Alex is telling protesters they should eat people. | ||
| The thesis could probably be summed up in this paragraph from the article. | ||
| The real danger, however, probably isn't to Jones' neighbors, but to all of us who might suffer the consequences from the actions of Jones who take his words literally. | ||
| While millions of Americans have good reason to be concerned about their economic well-being, Jones is tapping into the fear of his listeners and suggesting that violence might be necessary for self-survival. | ||
| We're living in days when openly armed protesters are storming legislatures, so it's not a far leap to believe that people listening to Jones' extreme exhortations might be further provoked towards fear and violence. | ||
| Perhaps they might not see their neighbors as meals, but they might increasingly see them as adversaries in a world of accelerating scarcity. | ||
| The point of this article is that in times of crisis, it's crucial that we recognize our interdependence and that we see each other as being in this together. | ||
| Rants about eating your neighbors to feed your children is the sort of thing that's based on the opposite mentality, where you view everyone as on their own and that you are at best a commodity I can use and at worst a threat to myself and my loved ones. | ||
| The author of the article is really clear about this and even defends Alex's right to say all the dumb and dangerous shit that he does. | ||
| Quote, When Alex does these publicity stunts, a big downside to responding is that your response will be turned into a straw man that he will use to further radicalize his audience against any non-Infowars sources of information. | ||
| I think this Forbes piece makes a great point, and I think it's an important thing to remember, that it's crucial to look at people around you as collaborators, not competitors or food. | ||
| But ultimately, making that point in response to Alex's rant is probably counterproductive. | ||
| So, like I said, that's what's going to happen. | ||
| Alex is going to lie about coverage of his stuff in order to fit it into the mold that he has in order to further insulate his audience and gaslight people who are coming to check him out based on that. | ||
| So, Alex keeps talking about a modest proposal and he said it's one of his favorite essays. | ||
| I'm not sure he's read it. | ||
| Now, let's get into it. | ||
| A modest proposal from 1730 was Jonathan Swift and Anglobe. | ||
| Slash Irish cleric who was so sick of watching people starve to death by the thousands and the English government saying, oh, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Keep their taxes high. | ||
| He said, well, then let's just tell them to keep their taxes high. | ||
| Tell them to us and we'll eat them. | ||
| He describes how to fatten them up, how to butcher them. | ||
| And it's the most famous piece of satire out there. | ||
| So real quick, Amadis'proposal is from 1729, not 1730. | ||
| Small difference, but it's one of the indications that Alex probably has no idea about what he's talking about. | ||
| It seems from Alex's telling of the story that he thinks Amadis'proposal had something to do with text as being too high, which is not considered to be a mainstream reading of the text. | ||
| But it does make sense, considering that he probably only knows about the pamphlet from reading about it in some JBS, John Birch's. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, he's talking about beggars and, like, destitute poor. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| The ones who don't worry too much about taxes. | ||
| I don't think they're a primary concern. | ||
| So one of the main issues about reading a modest proposal from the academic standpoint is determining if Swift himself is the speaker in the text, or if it's a disconnected persona he's created for the pamphlet. | ||
| Elizabeth Hedrick explores this question in her piece for the journal Studies in Philology from Fall 2017, which gets into why this is a relevant question. | ||
| The suggestion of eating the poor relies on irony to be satire, but if it's understood that Swift himself is the one making this proposal... | ||
| There's a problem with the irony, namely that Swift is well-documented as absolutely hating the Irish poor. | ||
| His writings and sermons have been shown to include, quote, angrily blaming the distresses of the Irish poor on their moral failings. | ||
| You can easily see how if this is the person making the modest proposal, things get a bit murky. | ||
| And thus, the more widely accepted views of the character speaking in the pamphlet is not the author's voice, but fully detached from Jonathan Swift himself. | ||
| Hedrick argues that the way to bridge these two personae is to consider Swift's other writings, including particularly his non-satire pieces, to gain a better understanding of exactly what the target of a modest proposal satire was. | ||
| Though admittedly there are a lot of barbs going in many directions, taken in the context of his body of work, Hedrick argues that the main thing being attacked in a modest proposal is societal politeness, and the Whig assumption, quote, that good manners were in a sense transparent rather than performative, a reliable sign of one's own innate goodness rather than a pleasing front for malice or aggression. | ||
| This was a view that Swift, quote, found ethically simple-minded and politically dishonest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The narrator of the proposal is perfectly polite, in juxtaposition with the barbaric suggestion he's making, seeing himself as the savior of the country for proposing a solution that would deal with the problem of poverty. | |
| This was mirroring the equally stupid but politely delivered suggestions that polite people were making at the time. | ||
| And if you consider who Jonathan Swift was and what he believed, it's pretty clear that this is the largest part of the proposal. | ||
| So, essentially, he's talking almost about... | ||
| The difference between Obama and Trump bombing people. | ||
| Obama is putting a very calm and polite face on the atrocities that he's committing and Trump is a barbaric monster. | ||
| He's satirizing the political position that that is a relevant difference. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That the polite face... | ||
| Is more important than the action itself. | ||
| To an extent. | ||
| And that a lot of the things that had been suggested to help with the problem of poverty were awful, unviable, not working solutions delivered politely for the sake of putting a mask on your own nonsense. | ||
| And he sure as shit did not care about the poor. | ||
| That was not his motivation. | ||
| He wrote screeds against them, including 1737's, quote, A proposal for giving badges to the beggars in all the parishes of Dublin. | ||
| That piece was very much not satire, and it includes this description of the impoverished, quote, They are too lazy to work, they are not afraid to steal nor ashamed to beg, and yet are too proud to be seen with a badge, as many of them have confessed to me. | ||
| For several years past, I have not disposed of one single farthing to a street beggar, nor intend to do so until I see better regulation, and I have endeavored to persuade all my brother walkers to follow my example, which most of them assure me they do. | ||
| For, if beggary be not able to beat out pride, it cannot deserve charity. | ||
| Swift did not care about the well-being of the poor. | ||
| He was offended by the false Whig politeness with which solutions to the problem of poverty were suggested. | ||
| Ultimately, that could have the effect of pushing for actual solutions that could help the poor, but that doesn't seem to be Swift's primary concern. | ||
| So, how does this relate to Alex and his rant about eating his neighbors? | ||
| Simply put, it doesn't, because nothing Alex did had a point. | ||
| He's trying to claim that he was making a modest proposal about eating his neighbors to draw attention to the fact that there are people in the developing world starving, but that is completely absent from his actual rant. | ||
| He was just talking about being willing to eat his neighbors so that his children don't starve. | ||
| If there's any rhetorical connection to people starving in the developing world, the best Alex could possibly claim is that his words are a condemnation of the people who are parents of starving children in those countries who don't kill their neighbors to feed their children. | ||
| But that doesn't seem like the point he was trying to make, but it would track. | ||
| Yeah, that is a fair. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You couldn't. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I think I will. | ||
| I think I have. | ||
| You're welcome to. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Actually, you've convinced me, Dan. | ||
| That was a brilliant piece of satire on Alex's part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think that that's... | |
| I do think that people in countries should eat their neighbors. | ||
| I think that that's the best he could do. | ||
| If you take the position that Swift was really attacking the genteel politeness that was just the pleasing facade that hid people's real cruelty, would it be possible to connect that with Alex's rant? | ||
| I still think not. | ||
| If he were covering the people starving in the developing world and suggested we eat them, then the connection would be really clear. | ||
| But it doesn't track that yelling about eating your neighbors to feed your child is somehow a suggestion that lampoons the politeness of people who offer suggestions of how to help people in the developing world but don't actually care. | ||
| I've really tried to find an angle where it could reasonably be argued that Alex's rank qualified as some kind of purposeful act of irony or satire, and everything I can come up with fails to satisfy the basic qualifications. | ||
| Also, let's not forget that Alex talks about how everyone becomes a cannibal after 14-15 days with no food all the time. | ||
| It's something that long predates his newfound concern with foreign hunger. | ||
| And his discussing of his willingness to eat people isn't even really new. | ||
| On his show from December 16th, 2019, he discussed how in a collapse, if people were coming to eat him, he would eat them. | ||
| In about 10 days of no food, most people become cannibals. | ||
| About 80% become cannibals. | ||
| The other 20% usually commit suicide. | ||
| And so, yeah, your kids are starving to death. | ||
| I wouldn't go out and grab other groups of people and then eat them. | ||
| But I'm just being honest. | ||
| We're talking about the lizard brain kicking in the lower brain. | ||
| I'm just being honest. | ||
| Let's say a raiding party comes to your house and tries to eat you during a collapse, and you haven't eaten in about a week and a half. | ||
| They're trying to eat you. | ||
| I'm not going to go out and eat children and stuff, but I'll gun these guys down, and then I'm going to eat them. | ||
| So, I mean, it's self-defense cannibalism, but it's still like, he has these fantasies a bit. | ||
| It's a long way to go to justify you kind of wanting to taste what a human is, you know? | ||
| Alex doesn't care about people in the developing world, and he never has. | ||
| He supported Ron Paul for most of his career, which is disqualifying when you try to pretend that you're now concerned about the well-being of people in poorer countries. | ||
| Alex only pretends to care now because he believes that pointing to people going hungry in the developing world makes his argument about reopening businesses. | ||
| He thinks that it's his trump card he can play to win any argument by accusing someone of not caring about people going hungry. | ||
| If we do get through this virus crisis and things go back to somewhat normal, I bet anything I own that Alex completely forgets about how much he cares about people having food in Africa or South America. | ||
| He's just a sick fuck who sits around and pretty regularly thinks about how he's going to eat people when shit gets bad. | ||
| And what he's doing now is just the way Alex is trying to pretend to take a moral high ground after getting a ton of free press, and he's trying to make his unhinged outburst seem like it was some brilliant piece of art. | ||
| Also, fun fact... | ||
| In a modest proposal, Swift totally blames an imaginary American for his proposal. | ||
| I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young, healthy child, well-nursed at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout. | ||
| I guess this outlandish idea would come off as more genuine, and thus better straight-faced satire if the idea traced back to an American. | ||
| Alex should probably resent that, if he's ever read it. | ||
| I mean, if he's due in 1729, then I imagine that the other implication there is that people who live in America are all savages along with the Native Americans, that kind of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, or at least other, you know, backwoodsy, perhaps. | |
| I remember that. | ||
| When I was in, what, I think... | ||
| In 11th grade, my friend and I, we had to read a modest proposal and do a creative thing on it. | ||
| So we made a cooking show where we cooked and ate a baby, and it was delicious. | ||
| It was very good. | ||
| It wasn't an actual baby. | ||
| Good. | ||
| I'm glad you clarified that. | ||
| I needed to make that point clear because it didn't come off like I was making that point clear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| What you do in 11th grade? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex is 46. Yeah, that does seem a little different. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Alex is really insistent that this was this Swiftian satire and all that, and the media has taken him seriously, but some people got it. | ||
| Now, a lot of folks did get it. | ||
| RT got it. | ||
| It's a Swift reference, Alex Jones says. | ||
| Eat my neighbors. | ||
| Rant was satire to highlight people starving in COVID-19 lockdown. | ||
| National File got it. | ||
| So Alex's two examples of people who got it are RT and National File. | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| State-run propaganda network and basically my-run propaganda network. | ||
| National File is run by Alex's associate and probably employee Tom Pappert, so might as well be Infowars. | ||
| As for RT, the article Alex is referring to, he read the headline. | ||
| It's, quote... | ||
| It's a swift reference, Alex Jones says. | ||
| Eat my neighbor's rant was satire to highlight people starving in COVID-19 lockdown. | ||
| That headline is not reporting that Alex's rant was satire. | ||
| It's quoting Alex's explanation. | ||
| The actual RT article at least twice calls into question if Alex's words were really satire, most directly in this paragraph. | ||
| Quote. | ||
| Notably, Swift's essay is largely about class and the poor being used as commodities in society with little regard for their lives and not about a viral pandemic. | ||
| But Jones insists that the COVID-19 lockdown will cause more deaths than the actual virus by wiping out the third world and causing millions of poor people to starve to death. | ||
| This is not about RT getting it. | ||
| It's an article covering Alex's attempt to explain himself that doesn't actually sound like they're all that convinced. | ||
| So, good, Alex. | ||
| Use this as, these people get it. | ||
| Yeah, it does have the feel of, like, they don't buy his argument at all. | ||
| However, it is very expedient to put the headline up there that makes it look like he's got a defense for himself. | ||
| That would make the most sense to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So Alex drops this thread for a while. | ||
| He's said his piece about the great press that he's getting and all this. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he gets to just ranting about, you know, standard-ass coronavirus nonsense. | ||
| And he basically is going even harder on the, oh, the doctors are partying. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So when somebody gets in your face about be a hero and, you know, bow to the medical workers, most of them are partying their asses off and the hospitals are empty. | ||
| That's a fact, folks! | ||
| Because they get $39,000 per COVID patient. | ||
| Look out, you come in there with a cold, they're going to snake a thing down your throat, blow your lungs out, kill your ass, and then collect the money on your dead ass. | ||
| Well, that's nice of them. | ||
| So now they're going to kill you if you go to a hospital. | ||
| So great. | ||
| That's really dangerous rhetoric. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| If you are feeling sick, do not go see a medical professional because they will kill you. | ||
| $39,000. | ||
| That's what your life is worth. | ||
| Does Alec, I mean, I don't know if he understands how medical work works. | ||
| He absolutely does not. | ||
| Does he think that these hospitals, even if they're getting $39,000 for these patients, Do you think that's more than normally operating hospitals would be bringing in? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| It's the COVID bump. | ||
| Everybody's inflation. | ||
| Pretty fucking ridiculous. | ||
| So, Alex, like I said, he was done with the thread of defending his cannibalism comments, but he's never really actually done. | ||
| Because he gets into behavior that I would say he's clearly begging people to write more articles about it. | ||
| If there's a total collapse and everything, you're right, I won't eat full-grown adults because they're good. | ||
| I will go out with the left and I will eat babies. | ||
| Or I will support Governor Northam when he says keep babies alive, instead of just harvesting their organs, I'll go into the hospital and I'll buy aborted babies to eat them. | ||
| Now the headline will be, Alex Jones wants to buy aborted babies and eat them. | ||
| No, that's what Governor Northam does. | ||
| He keeps them alive. | ||
| He takes their organs. | ||
| But because it's real, everyone says it's good and loving. | ||
| But because I'm pointing out how evil they are and trying to save people, I'm the bad guy. | ||
| That's how the delusion works with the corporate media. | ||
| Speaking of food, the whole civilization society is designed to collapse. | ||
| Depression continues. | ||
| We'll be dying like people in the third world. | ||
| So don't eat your neighbors and don't eat your people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God damn it. | |
| No, ladies and gentlemen, get high-quality, horrible food, which we have now available again. | ||
| What a dick, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, yep. | |
| That's what it's all about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| That's all the game is. | ||
| You can see it pretty clearly there. | ||
| If you can't turn it into an ad, what are you doing? | ||
| What's even the point? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| It's all just flowing downhill until it gets to this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| That's the game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So, Alex has Francis Boyle on the show, and who cares? | ||
| It's mostly pretty standard stuff, but... | ||
| I do think that this clip is pretty interesting. | ||
| At the beginning of the show, we talked about how Alex was saying that the CDC admitted that they doubled the number of deaths. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Boyle has a very different perspective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we have to understand that. | |
| I think President Trump has to come to grips with that. | ||
| We're at war with COVID. | ||
| It's existentially dangerous. | ||
| The figures we are being given on casualties are completely bogus. | ||
| The Financial Times last week ran an article on excess casualties, that the real figures here are not the reported casualties, but the excess casualties. | ||
| And they went country by country, and the excess casualties were twice the reported casualties. | ||
| So I think that's probably what has happened here in the United States. | ||
| As of today, we're being told it's only 64,000 people who are dead. | ||
| Well, excess casualties, no one's given us a figure on that. | ||
| My guess is it's twice what we are being told. | ||
| And these officials at CDC and many of the others are just downplaying what we are really facing, Alex. | ||
| Most experts who have commented on the situation with the coronavirus have said that in all likelihood, the numbers that we have are underestimating the actual number of deaths as opposed to overestimating them. | ||
| I'm not sure if the conclusion that Boyle is coming to here is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that what he's saying is a direct contradiction of the things that Alex claimed to know for a fact earlier. | ||
| Earlier in the episode, he reported that the CDC was admitting that they'd exaggerated their death count by doubling it. | ||
| But here Boyle is saying that it's probably the exact opposite. | ||
| Both of them are dealing with a factor of two. | ||
| Let's not worry about how they're using the math. | ||
| It's either one half or twice as much. | ||
| It's the same basic concept. | ||
| So the Financial Times article he's referencing looked into statistics of how many more deaths had been reported in the week ending April 17th. | ||
| From the article, quote, in that week, 22,351 deaths were registered in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics. | ||
| The highest figure since comparable weekly data started in 1993 and worse than any figure in similar data of the past 50 years. | ||
| The average for the comparable week from 2015 to 2019 was 10,497. | ||
| From that data, there's a conversation that seems to suggest the death toll might be much higher than is being reported in England and Wales. | ||
| The total of 27,015 more deaths than the five-year average being between the beginning of March and April 17th. | ||
| It's too premature to draw too many conclusions from this data, but it's definitely notable and something that demands further exploration. | ||
| This article doesn't go through it country by country. | ||
| It's just about the discrepancy that the Financial Times found in England and Wales. | ||
| However, there was a separate Financial Times article that looked at the overall fatalities during March and April across 14 different countries. | ||
| This article was published on April 26th and found 122,000 excess deaths in these countries as compared to the average number of expected deaths during that time frame. | ||
| This was compared to the approximately 77,000 reported COVID-19 deaths at that time, which they suggest could mean that the official numbers are pretty low. | ||
| They go on to suggest that if this same pattern of underreporting were to be universal across the world, there could be as many as 117,000 unreported COVID-19 deaths that we're not capturing in official statistics. | ||
| This, again, is something that needs further study, but it's definitely hard to look at some of the data they present about how much higher the number of deaths are in various places than the normal average numbers, and even higher than the average plus the official COVID-19 count, and not think that something's being missed there. | ||
| It's tough to explain, but it requires further explanation. | ||
| It's hard not to account for the extreme political desire that people would have for underreporting. | ||
| Like in the two eyes and three nays report, it does seem like they're blaming China for... | ||
| Withholding information about that and trying to downplay the severity of the threat. | ||
| As though that isn't exactly what Trump did at the same time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Almost simultaneously. | ||
| So the idea that these two governments... | ||
| China did it first. | ||
| Yeah, great. | ||
| The idea that these two governments are going to report things honestly is utterly... | ||
| You can't believe it. | ||
| It's simply not possible to believe. | ||
| Maybe it is true. | ||
| Maybe they are reporting it, but believing it without absolute information seems ridiculous. | ||
| They've lost all benefit of the doubt in regards to lying directly to our faces. | ||
| Speaking of people who don't have the benefit of the doubt... | ||
| We got Alex Jones. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Here's the last clip from May 3rd, and it's Alex talking about his cannibalism comments more. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| And this one really set me off. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Jones here, and I don't try to get up here and say sensational things just to say it when I'm covering serious news. | ||
| Sometimes I do satire, like last Tuesday I got picked up Friday, was the number one thing on Twitter for two days, where I said, I'm not going to eat people's children during a collapse, I'm going to eat my neighbors. | ||
| Then I went on to explain I was doing a Jonathan. | ||
| Swift allegory. | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| Just a minute of it out of context. | ||
| But I knew they'd do that, and people then came and found the truth of what I was talking about. | ||
| So, Jordan, I'm sorry about this in advance, but like I said, that clip really set me off. | ||
| Holy shit, I'm set off. | ||
| That is such a brazen act of gaslighting that it triggered a bit of a pointless exercise in literary criticism that we're about to embark on that I view as equal parts illuminating. | ||
| And completely pointless. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| I went back and listened to the entire cannibalism rant again, and at no point did Alex ever say that he was suggesting he'd eat neighbors instead of eating children. | ||
| That is absolutely not a part of his rant. | ||
| He's just making that up. | ||
| Also, at no point did he say he was doing a Swift-style allegory or whatever he's pretending now. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| In fact, multiple times he says, I'm not joking. | ||
| No, he says it multiple times. | ||
| And when he does say that he's joking, he's saying it very obviously to suggest that he's not. | ||
| So I was listening back to it, and I kind of realized that if we accept what Alex is saying, that it was satire, it's essentially impossible to discern what his point was. | ||
| That's because the approximately four-minute rant has a number of tonal shifts within it, where he's talking about this theme of eating people from completely different standpoints. | ||
| It starts with him talking about how in the Great Depression, people were more self-sufficient than we are now. | ||
| And as we know, Alex believes that fake statistic about 7 million people starving in the Great Depression, which he doesn't bring up, but it's clearly in his mind. | ||
| This is where things begin, at which point he says that he's willing to eat his neighbors. | ||
| This is clearly meant to be a declaration of how tough and survival-ready he is. | ||
| There's clearly nothing more to the conversation at the beginning than this. | ||
| He's clear that this is about his children not starving and whatnot, but it's all just, I'll kill and eat humans to survive type bragging. | ||
| It's conversation about how he's been looking at his neighbors and wondering if he would kill and eat them, and he's decided he will. | ||
| This section of the rant could be seen as satire, possibly, of how stupid preppers are, and how they have these survival fantasies that are more based on things they want to live out, as opposed to realistic scenarios that may come to pass. | ||
| But I don't think that's the intent. | ||
| There's zero chance that this section of the rant could be interpreted as any other kind of satire. | ||
| There's just nothing going on there other than violent fantasy ranting. | ||
| This goes on for about a minute and a half, before Alex gets a light in his eye and shifts things, saying... | ||
| That's why I want you globalists to know I'll eat your ass first. | ||
| This section of the rank completely abandons the idea of feeding his hungry children. | ||
| And now eating people has become a specifically violent act. | ||
| He mumbles his murder fantasies about getting his hands around globalist throats and said he's going to eat them because they didn't accept Christ. | ||
| It's clearly cannibalism that's meant as a punishment where Alex is the instrument of punishment. | ||
| During this section, the notion of eating people for sustenance is completely forgotten. | ||
| He did forget that. | ||
| Then it went from defensive to offensive very quickly. | ||
| About 40 seconds later, he returns to the idea of his children starving. | ||
| So he's spinning two plates at the same time. | ||
| He's ranting about eating his neighbor to feed his children and also eating a globalist as a religious punishment. | ||
| At that point, Alex says you could, quote, take this as a metaphysical hypothetical, but it's not really. | ||
| And he says that we need to get over the jokes. | ||
| Alex is bad with words, so metaphysical hypothetical in this context probably just means hypothetical. | ||
| He's expressing that this is not hypothetical. | ||
| It would be like if there was a line in a modest proposal where Swift just throws in, I know this sounds like satire, but it's not. | ||
| Hold on, guys, real quick, act break. | ||
| Just gonna put this in as a side, like it's a David Foster Wallace footnote. | ||
| It's a convoluting influence, and it serves to muddy the performance. | ||
| Considerably, if he actually has some kind of intent behind it. | ||
| After Alex says that he's serious, he rambles about how actuaries show that after seven days everyone kills for food and after 14 most people are cannibals. | ||
| This is the introduction of a made-up thing, but it's something that's very real in Alex's world. | ||
| He's using sources that are real to him and his audience to justify the act of eating people. | ||
| Alex says that he would commit suicide before eating people, but his children are his, quote, weak place. | ||
| So now we're back to this being about eating his neighbor to feed his kids. | ||
| And it appears the entire section about eating a globalist to show them how they're wrong about God is supposed to be ignored, which is not the mark of a master craftsman. | ||
| Then, 30 seconds later, Alex gets back to punishment cannibalism, talking about how the spirit cookers out there are drinking blood and how he's going to drink their blood. | ||
| He says that he'll cut them into filet mignon before watching his daughters starve, which is weird because now these two different contexts of eating people are getting mingled together when they're very different ideas that he's been juggling. | ||
| From this point on through the rest of the rant, nothing makes sense because it's two different discrete ideas that are being combined. | ||
| There's the notion of eating his neighbor for survival, and the notion of relishing eating a globalist. | ||
| These are not the same ideas, but they're being combined, so he's saying he'll barbecue your leftist ass so the kids won't starve. | ||
| It's convoluted. | ||
| This kind of only makes sense if his neighbor is also a globalist that he's going to eat as punishment, but only once he runs out of his storable food. | ||
| That's another point as to why this isn't satire. | ||
| Alex explicitly says that he won't have to eat his neighbor for a few years because he has a lot of storable food. | ||
| If this truly was something that was meant to be Swifty in satire, how does that element factor into it? | ||
| According to Alex's own narratives, by the time he's out of survival food, the people in the developing world will not need to be helped in any way. | ||
| It'll be too late. | ||
| They will have already eaten each other. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| Because they don't all have storable food. | ||
| The crisis that he's talking about is already past the point. | ||
| Man, in two years, this is going to be such good satire. | ||
| And even if any of this is connected, a couple years down the road, he eats his neighbor because he's run out of storable food. | ||
| That does nothing, you know... | ||
| That'll save the hungry. | ||
| Yeah, there's absolutely nothing to help out people in the developing world. | ||
| Oh, thank God Alex ate his neighbor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or a globalist. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You gotta understand, Dan. | ||
| It's just like Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do. | ||
| You have to attack while defending and defend while attacking. | ||
| That's the trick. | ||
| You're saving your daughter's life and you're punishing the globalists all at the same time. | ||
| Doesn't work. | ||
| Doesn't work. | ||
| Brilliant! | ||
| So that detail, though, of I won't have to do this for a few years because I've got survival food, that's a fingerprint that Alex is just spitballing and making shit up as he goes along. | ||
| He realizes in the middle of his violent rant that he sells storable food, so he needs a caveat, or else he might get a phone call from My Patriot Supply asking him why he's promoting a different disaster nutritional plan when he's a paid shill for them. | ||
| You can kind of tell that's what's going on there. | ||
| So at the end of the rant, Alex says what comes closest to being what I think he thinks is poignant. | ||
| He says that, quote, The performance artist thing, taken in the context of Alex's show, is meant to be a signifier that he's not a performance artist. | ||
| It began in his custody hearing a few years back when his lawyer argued in court that his show should not be used to determine custody because on air he's playing a character. | ||
| Alex got mad about that, and since then, he's gotten really defensive when people say he's a performance artist. | ||
| So when he goes to break saying something like that, winkingly saying, I'm a performance artist, I'm as fake as they come, regular listeners know exactly what that's code for. | ||
| As to the idea of that last line being about starving people in the developing world in Africa and Latin America, that's cool, but it doesn't relate to literally anything he said up until that point. | ||
| You can't just tag an unrelated line on the end of something and then pretend that everything before it relates when it doesn't. | ||
| Also, what does living off starving Africans and Latin Americans mean to Alex? | ||
| It would be interesting to hear him explore that concept and, you know, wrestle with how he could have ever supported politicians who use fiscal arguments to decrease both foreign aid as well as nutritional assistance programs domestically. | ||
| I'd like to see him discuss this a little bit more. | ||
| Hey, Ron Paul doesn't want to eat... | ||
| People from developing nations, he just wants them to starve on their own two feet. | ||
| Pull yourselves up by your own cannibalism, Dan. | ||
| That's what Ron Paul was really all about. | ||
| Anyway, this critical reading has gone on far too long, but I just realized when I re-listened to the rant that one of the primary reasons that it fails as both a straightforward argument as well as in terms of satire is because it has no consistent theme to what cannibalism means in the context of the speech. | ||
| This is a really important aspect to why some satire, like A Modest Proposal, works, and this doesn't. | ||
| If Swift had spent part of his pamphlet arguing politely that people should eat poor children to eliminate poverty, and also had chunks where he descended into fantasies about how you could eat those kids because fuck them, no one would hold that up as a coherent piece of writing. | ||
| Satire is intensely difficult because it requires a precision that most people aren't capable of. | ||
| And you can definitely count Alex among such people. | ||
| I am furious that the right wing even knows the word satire because they are incapable of it. | ||
| And yet they keep trying to use it as though they know what it means. | ||
| You guys don't have any fucking clue what satire is. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| You are satire. | ||
| It is impossible to parody you because you are parodies of yourselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Embody the thing that you are incapable of understanding. | ||
| It's infuriating. | ||
| Which could be satire. | ||
| I mean, if I wrote Alex's rant as a satire of him, then yes, that would make sense. | ||
| But even then, I would do it poorly because I would try and have a consistent theme. | ||
| Well, that wouldn't be the shape it would take. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| And I really did sit with this for a long time last night. | ||
| Really trying to figure out a way to fix it. | ||
| Like fix his rant and make it... | ||
| Do some punch-up? | ||
| But I really couldn't come up with a coherent way that you bridge the gap. | ||
| What he's trying to say is, instead of satire, publicity stunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What he's trying to say is, I did something as a spectacle in order to get eyes on my product, and then he's rationalizing it by saying, what I really wanted people to pay attention when they came was me talking about people who are starving in the developing world. | ||
| He's trying to say that it's satire, but it's really just, I yelled into a bullhorn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not satire. | |
| He's a disingenuous opportunist. | ||
| That's the opposite of satire. | ||
| So, the fourth Monday comes around, and this episode's trash. | ||
| Elizabeth's really not good. | ||
| On Star Wars Day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| May the 4th was not with him, or however you'd phrase that. | ||
| Yeah, it's bad. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| We start in familiar territory. | ||
| Now, let me get into this, because I want to cover this right now. | ||
| Cannibalism. | ||
| It was a big controversy when I came out last Tuesday, and I was going along with the satire. | ||
| Oh, going along with it. | ||
| 1730, saying he would eat Irish children because the Irish were subhuman. | ||
| Because no one was taking care of the Irish and was overtaxing them and overregulating them and they were starving to death. | ||
| Overregulating the Irish? | ||
| Because he was Irish. | ||
| He said, how about we just start eating the Irish babies? | ||
| And he published it like it was serious and it's the most famous satire in the world. | ||
| So I did a whole piece showing real articles from the UN about... | ||
| 30-plus million starving to death right now. | ||
| 135 million starving to death. | ||
| I played the head of the World Food Program talking about it. | ||
| And then I said, well, fine. | ||
| Once all the food runs out, I'll just eat my liberal neighbors. | ||
| Knowing they'd pick it up, but they edited it down to one minute. | ||
| I did it to draw attention to the starvation because when the first world collapses... | ||
| The third world dies. | ||
| That's a catchphrase that Alex is trying to push on this episode pretty clearly. | ||
| And also, again, Alex knows nothing about Swift. | ||
| Like, if anything, he wanted higher regulation of the poor. | ||
| He wrote that proposal to give badges to the beggars. | ||
| Like, that is specifically a control regulation. | ||
| In some ways, he was asking for the mark of the beast to be applied to the beggars. | ||
| He did not like the poor at all. | ||
| From that proposal to give badges pamphlet, quote, He has disdain for the poor. | ||
| There's a really good book called Futuristic Violence in Fancy Suits by David Wong. | ||
| And one of my favorite lines is when the main character just says, the rich always think they can starve the poor into the behavior that they want. | ||
| And it's just such that kind of shit of like, if we just... | ||
| Fuck them over enough, they'll do what we say. | ||
| And for Swift, it was, they'll wear the badges. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or whatever. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And let's not even get into the topic of Jonathan Swift's feelings about foreign beggars, who he calls evil in an infestation, and suggests they be, quote, driven or whipped out of town. | ||
| Whoa, are you saying that a British aristocrat in 1729, or no, 1737 or whenever this was published? | ||
| That was, yeah, 1737 for the second one. | ||
| So you're saying that he did not have a positive view of foreigners? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| That's wild. | ||
| Sounds a lot like Alex. | ||
| That sounds wild, right? | ||
| His non-ironic treatise on giving badges to the poor sounds very similar to a lot of ideas Alex has. | ||
| Alex doesn't understand the underlying satire of the piece he's trying to pretend he's emulating, and perhaps more importantly, he's completely lying about his presentation. | ||
| This is all just a pathetic act of gaslighting his audience, and he's trying as hard as he can to keep this story alive. | ||
| He saw good returns from it, so he's just begging people to keep giving him that attention that he needs. | ||
| And honestly, the thing that's probably most offensive about it is his attempt to use this in some way. | ||
| as a prop for his own purposes. | ||
| He's cheapening that by virtue of the way he's incorporating it as his pretend motivation behind his rant. | ||
| It's all very offensive, really, when you get down to it, and all very sad. | ||
| I give it a week before Trump comes out and says we need to reopen the economy in order to help other countries. | ||
| I give it a week. | ||
| I think that it's the way you make that argument. | ||
| And actually, we don't have any clips of it, because I don't really care, but Alex talks to Alan Keyes on this episode for like an hour, and he's kind of making that same sort of argument. | ||
| It's like, yes, we are fine. | ||
| With distancing and closing businesses because we don't want to hurt other people. | ||
| We're not scared, but we don't want to hurt other people. | ||
| And so if you make the argument that going back and getting sick is better for everyone, people will want to do that. | ||
| He kind of has that sort of sense. | ||
| And we don't have any clips of it because it's really boring and I don't really like Alan Keyes. | ||
| But there's a sense of like... | ||
| Throughout that interview and most of the first, I'm sorry, the fourth, there's very much this, like, we've got to get back, we've got to go back to work, you know, we've got to, you know, and I think that what's being expressed is a real desire for this to be over, and I think that there is a feeling that Alex and his guests are presenting that they seem to think that there are people who don't want this to be over, and I don't know any such people. | ||
| I don't know who those people are. | ||
| I think everybody wants this to end. | ||
| And I kind of feel like this is basically like a bad trip. | ||
| You know, like I took acid when I was younger and I had a bad trip. | ||
| It wasn't a terrible bad trip like some people have, but it was pretty bad. | ||
| And one of the things that allowed it to not be so bad... | ||
| And I've talked to other people who've done far more psychedelics than I have, and this is something that rings true with a number of people I've spoken to, is that I recognized that I'd taken a drug and I accepted the terrible things that I was experiencing and knew that this is going to end eventually. | ||
| You get into more trouble in situations like that if you fight against it, if you feel the need to... | ||
| ghosts that are, are, are, you know, whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so what's going on is I think that you see these different reactions to what is essentially, uh, Overwhelming inconvenience. | |
| A bad trip is an overwhelming inconvenience that you have no control over and you have to ride out. | ||
| It will end. | ||
| You can make it worse. | ||
| Maybe extend it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know the pharmacology of it. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But it's the same thing with this circumstance that we find ourselves in. | ||
| Everybody is having a metaphorical bad trip. | ||
| And you can either choose to go along with it, accept that this is like, yep. | ||
| There is a point when we'll be through this, but the people who are fighting against all of this, like Alex, insisting we need to go back to work prematurely and all this, they are the people who are fighting and are going to make it all worse. | ||
| They are the people who are going to make the bad trip hellish as opposed to inconvenient and bad. | ||
| There are problems that you have to deal with along the way, obviously, but there are problems that... | ||
| Aren't being solved by actions of people like Alex. | ||
| That was just a sort of thought that I had. | ||
|
unidentified
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I couldn't shake. | |
| I think we're in a situation where we have to recognize that height has nothing to do with whether or not you're an adult. | ||
| And we continue to treat these people as though they're adults. | ||
| And they are not. | ||
| We do not want... | ||
| You don't want to argue with these people. | ||
| They need a daycare. | ||
| They need somebody who knows how to deal with children. | ||
| We also need to eliminate financial incentives to act like children. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, it's just so... | ||
| Of course you want this to be over, so take the steps necessary for it to be over, because the steps you're taking make sure that it never fucking ends. | ||
| It does seem that way. | ||
| So if you want it to be over, then it has to end. | ||
| You can't just say it's over. | ||
| And that's the magical thinking that we're dealing with. | ||
| It's just like, oh, if we say it's over, then it will be over. | ||
| Well, I think one of the problems, too, is that they recognize that if everybody cooperates and goes along with things, the measures that we've been taking... | ||
| That there's a good chance that eventually we will get through this. | ||
| And that doctors will make some breakthroughs that are able to... | ||
| Maybe it is a vaccine. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And that is a nightmare for them. | ||
| Because the possibility that doctors, the evil people in their conception, end up being able to help us return to more of a normal state of affairs. | ||
| That works totally against everything they need to be there. | ||
| So I think that there's part of it that might even just be subconscious that is hoping to sabotage that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| If the government is the solution, then that's a refutation of everything they've ever believed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even if it is a weird government. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even if it's the worst government in history. | ||
| Even if it's anything. | ||
| If government is the reason that we get through this, then everything they've ever believed about fucking... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Ayn Rand can go fuck itself. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| And then they would rather die than be wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And Alex would rather die than actually read a short pamphlet. | ||
| That is exactly the case. | ||
| So I've noticed, and I haven't brought this up because I thought it was maybe a little bit gauche, but I've noticed that Alex has been coughing a bit on air. | ||
| And Alex brings that up. | ||
| And it's interesting what his interpretation of this is. | ||
| Speaking of... | ||
| COVID-19. | ||
| I don't cough like this, except when I'm in this new studio. | ||
| And I think we should have the air conditioners checked in here. | ||
| Because my wife was watching the show last night, the Sunday show. | ||
| She's like, got to keep pausing to cough. | ||
| And yeah, when I come in here, maybe it's because the air conditioner's right above me. | ||
| But it just makes me cough and makes my bronchial seize up. | ||
| So we need to have these air conditioners inspected or looked up. | ||
| Something's going on. | ||
| I think that Alex is trying to put in place a possible other explanation in case he ends up getting COVID-19 from going to all these rallies. | ||
| Because certainly you wouldn't want that to be the optics of it. | ||
| That, yes, we went to all of these open-everything-up rallies, and then your hero with the bullhorn shaking everyone's hands. | ||
| Ends up getting sick. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Someone's put something in the air conditioning unit or whatever. | ||
| Gotta be. | ||
| Now, I don't know if Alex is sick. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But I'm only bringing this up because he brought it up. | ||
| And from my understanding of listening to Alex and knowing how his narratives work, that feels to me like preemptive just-in-case kind of thing. | ||
| He has been coughing a bit on air. | ||
| And this would be a good way for him to have a story in place in case he gets sick. | ||
|
unidentified
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Eh, maybe. | |
| Just call it mold. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Eh, he's got mold. | ||
| Can't go on air. | ||
| Yeah, sure, he's hospitalized for a few days, but that's no big deal. | ||
| It's mold. | ||
| So he gets to talking about this and how he probably has throat polyps, and he probably should get surgery about it, but he can't because then he'd be off air because he couldn't talk for a few days. | ||
| He's going to have some time. | ||
| He might. | ||
| Where is mine? | ||
| This is not a plug, but it is a plug. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I forgot about this. | ||
| Lung cleanse, huh? | ||
| They're good. | ||
| People have been saying, too, they noticed that I saw nurses and stuff on the website last night going, how much you've got polyps on your larynx? | ||
| I guarantee you, you've got to get that checked. | ||
| People are like, do you have throat cancer? | ||
| You know, I have not had a checkup since I was, like, 42. And I definitely screamed too loud at a lot of... | ||
| I've done demonstrations over the years, and so that's why my voice got very, very deep. | ||
| This is not a put-on with my voice, and it does need a good rest at some point. | ||
| But I'm told if I do have polyps, which I undoubtedly do, it would put me out for up to six weeks of not being able to talk. | ||
| If I had the polyps removed, then my voice would be a lot better. | ||
| But I do think I need to go get a checkup because it is going from being very deep, very baritone. | ||
| To sounding like rocks being put into a blender. | ||
| So I am aware of that. | ||
| And a lot of folks like my voice. | ||
| I personally don't like it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so maybe I should start just speaking at the very front of my mouth like this. | |
| Or I whisper. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because that's what's happening to my voice and I apologize for it. | |
| But that's just the way it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it gets exacerbated with whatever is in this room. | |
| By the way, I guess I'll turn this into a plug. | ||
| Most. | ||
| Oh, if you have to. | ||
| Throat or palate cleanser. | ||
| While I'm here. | ||
| One or two essential oils or some menthol, and then it's nothing but alcohol. | ||
| This is incredibly thick syrupy, so sometimes you've got to pull the top off under hot water. | ||
| It's all just a plug for his lung cleanse. | ||
| That's gross. | ||
| Yeah, it is really gross. | ||
| What he just described is gross. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, pretty gross. | ||
| Also, go to the doctor, Alex. | ||
| Oh, but he's probably worried that they'll call it COVID-19 and kill him for $39,000 or something. | ||
| Man, if a nurse is on the Infowars website. | ||
| Alleged nurse. | ||
| That's, whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh boy, I don't want to go to that hospital. | ||
| So like I said, the episode ends with an interview with Alan Keyes, and it's not important. | ||
| But also, the second hour of the show is almost entirely like an hour of David Icke being interviewed on that London Real show. | ||
| They did their third interview in that series or whatever. | ||
| It's stupid, and I don't care about it. | ||
| But it's kind of funny the way Alex is presenting it. | ||
| He's talking about how great it is that London Real is setting up their own platform where the man can't censor things like this David Icke interview and how you have to support that. | ||
| Simultaneously, Alex is insistent that people watch this London Real interview on Band.Video, which is literally driving traffic away from London Real towards Alex's own platforms, and Alex is playing almost the whole interview on his own show. | ||
| Hey, you gotta watch it on both, Dan. | ||
| Support everybody. | ||
| Gotta get those views. | ||
| Gotta get those clicks. | ||
| Write an article in The Hill. | ||
| Doesn't matter! | ||
| Alex is expressing that you need to support this thing just enough to profit off of it, which is kind of his M.O. Again, this is an interview where David... | ||
| Ike is arguing that there actually is no virus, which is an absolute and complete contradiction of everything that Alex is claiming to know definitively. | ||
| Alex should not be promoting this interview without also taking issue with the things David is saying and deconstructing how he's wrong. | ||
| If you're listening to Alex's show, you're hearing him yell about how the virus is a bioweapon created by Fauci and the Chinese and simultaneously hearing him promote and tacitly support David Ike saying that the virus is completely made up. | ||
| Alex tries to get around this glaring problem with stuff like this. | ||
| I agree with 99% of what he's saying. | ||
| Other than just, you know, denying there's any virus at all. | ||
| No, they had to release a simulant virus that does kill some people so that they can then counter it with their vaccine. | ||
| But this is dead on. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| So the problem here is that the disagreement that Alex and Ike have, that they seem to have, it shouldn't be a matter of opinion whether or not there actually is a virus. | ||
| Alex claims that all the things he's covered about the coronavirus are proven and absolutely factual. | ||
| So his position should be that Ike is wrong. | ||
| Alex had David Icke on his show recently, and the two are in contact, so Alex has had every opportunity to correct Icke about this clear misconception that he has about the virus being fake. | ||
| That hasn't happened, and there's a good reason as to why. | ||
| Alex isn't concerned with the truth, because if he was, he would have debated David Icke on the virus's reality when he was on the show, and one of two things would have happened. | ||
| He would have either convinced Ike, at which point Ike would stop this bullshit, or he would have failed to convince Ike, which would have to lead to the pretty clear conclusion that Ike isn't interested in living in reality, and maybe a whole lot of his other ideas should be treated like they're coming from the same brain that insists that there is no virus. | ||
| But really, neither of these outcomes are good for business. | ||
| If Alex convinces Ike that he has to stop saying that there's no virus, then Ike loses the thing that makes him stand out in this time of craziness. | ||
| His position in the market greatly decreases because he's staked a claim that was demonstrably wrong, and he's had to admit he was wrong, having been outwitted by fucking Alex Jones of all people. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be a real bummer for him. | ||
| That doesn't work for him. | ||
| Conversely, if Alex fails to convince Ike... | ||
| And has to conclude that Ike is a delusional weirdo who's expressing dangerous ideas for no reason, Alex can't co-opt the attention David Ike is getting for making these insane claims. | ||
| Alex needs all the attention he can get at this point, and David Ike is exactly the sort of weirdo you can count on to say something stupid when the going gets tough. | ||
| Each of these possibilities would hurt one of their abilities to run their game, and thus it's not something that can really happen. | ||
| Whether or not there is a virus should be a foundational, primary disagreement between them, which should have to be resolved before you can get into anything else. | ||
| If David Icke is right, then every coronavirus conspiracy Alex's claim to have proven falls apart immediately. | ||
| So it's not something that he should be so quick to wave off as a small 1% of David Icke's comments that he doesn't agree with. | ||
| It's not disagreement. | ||
| It should be things that Alex knows David Icke is wrong about. | ||
| And if he cared at all about conveying accurate information, he would have corrected Icke about this when he was on the show. | ||
| That blows up the game, though. | ||
| Alex punts and gives lip service to disagreeing about that and praises Icke generally so he can continue to profit off of the negative attention that David Icke is getting right now. | ||
| That's how this game works. | ||
| It's all maximize our outcomes and not do anything that explicitly ruins one of our ability to grift. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And the ultimate side effect of that is also beneficial to them, which is destroying any trust in anything. | ||
| Even the people you trust have completely fundamental disagreements. | ||
| That nothing matters. | ||
| Inherently contradictory. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Alex has Francis Boyle on the show on Sunday to say that there's double the deaths, we think, while Alex is reporting as proven fact that there's actually half the deaths that we report. | ||
| On Monday, Alex has an hour of David Icke's interview saying that there is no virus, while he's saying, like, I disagree with that little detail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That one tiny little thing. | ||
| Nothing makes sense. | ||
| Meanwhile, Alex is lying about his cannibalism rant throughout most of this. | ||
| It's just, this show's dumb. | ||
| The level of gaslighting that we live through on a daily basis. | ||
| Now, I feel like we're living in Groundhog Day, where from day to day, nothing that happened yesterday has any effect on today. | ||
| There's no narrative consistency. | ||
| Every single day, there's a new thing that is like, that's probably not true, and then you find out it's not, and then the next day, no one's held accountable for lying, so they just do it all over again. | ||
| I think part of that is because Trump is president, and because we focus on Alex Jones. | ||
| We probably feel it far more intensely than someone who doesn't do this, and so it can impact more, but yeah, I think it's tough. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I was kind of disappointed that his Monday show was an hour of David Icke and an hour of Alan Keyes, because that's like nothing for me. | ||
| I don't care at all. | ||
| So, I mean, a lot of this is, it seems like he's really trying to keep the cannibalism story alive, because it's his best play to get eyes on his shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's not going to work, though. | ||
| The only reason that it did get him attention was because he meant it. | ||
| Because he wasn't doing any fake satire bullshit. | ||
| It's because everybody saw that clip and were like, that is a genuine moment of a man saying that he is going to eat people. | ||
| And so everything after that is going to be manufactured and disingenuous. | ||
| Yeah, and it's going to be diminishing returns. | ||
| He's going to, it probably is a giant spike. | ||
| And then, I mean, I do think that there will be a small amount of people, some percentage that he'll be able to sway. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But I don't think it'll be all that much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nah. | |
| I think it'll be a flash in the pan. | ||
| And I don't know what else you can do. | ||
| Like, I keep saying this whenever he does stuff like this. | ||
| Like, I don't know what the next outburst is going to need to be. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, how do you, like, the public's attention. | ||
| Is now at the level of Alex said he'll eat his neighbors. | ||
| If he says something like, I'll beat up a stranger. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| He's got to buy a rocket. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah, he's got to buy something big, something stupid, something flashy. | ||
| Because he can't talk it. | ||
| He already bought a tank. | ||
| I know he bought a tank, but that wasn't flashy. | ||
| That wasn't flashy. | ||
| That was black. | ||
| It was a little flashy. | ||
| He needs something with rainbows on it. | ||
| It was garish. | ||
| I will give you that. | ||
| I don't know what his strategy for attention is moving forward. | ||
| Actually eat his neighbor. | ||
| Maybe try and settle the Sandy Hook lawsuit. | ||
| Nothing would be more satirical than actually eating your neighbor at this point, right? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| That's what satire is. | ||
| Deciding he's going to defend, like, represent himself in the Sandy Hook case. | ||
| See, that's what he's going to have to do. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That would be a disaster. | ||
| Rob Dew should do it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, I guess, I think that our next episode is going to be maybe some fireworks, because by the point that Monday's episode was happening, Alex didn't, or at least the news hadn't broken that Norm had left the case. | ||
| So, some of that stuff is increasing frustration. | ||
| I do think that towards the middle of this week, you're probably going to end up seeing some mess. | ||
| So I'm sticking around this present and hoping that I don't have to do another literary deconstruction of Alex's cannibalism rant, because I'm done with it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| If he brings it up again, I'm not going to discuss it. | ||
| I've said far more than my piece, and I'm sorry if anybody is... | ||
| You've said everything that needed to be said and a little bit more for good measure. | ||
| Which I think I appreciate. | ||
| So, we'll be back, Jordan. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at KnowledgeFight. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We are also on Facebook. | ||
| Indeed we are. | ||
| And if you'd like to download the show, go to iTunes, rate, leave, review, go to the Patreon. | ||
| Or if you could, please donate to a local charity in your area. | ||
| That would be very appreciated. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm... | |
| Nope. | ||
| Trying to make a pun of Taylor Jonathan Swift. | ||
| Jonathan Taylor Thomas Swift. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| Anyway, we'll be... | ||
| See ya. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |