Today, Dan and Jordan discuss how the week began on The Alex Jones Show. In this installment, Alex gets freaked out by bill numbers he thinks are satanic, falls for an internet hoax about New Guinea, and gets intensely hung up on the idea of men wearing pink.
I guess my bright spot is there's been some nice recommendations from people about various seltzers to try, and I'm thrilled that people are getting in on the act.
And simultaneously, I'd like to thank some of the people who have had dissenting opinions.
About not liking seltzer, but also still being cool with the fact that I've embarked down this weird road.
I appreciate both of these responses that people are having.
Because they're tolerant of my nonsense.
So, Jordan, today we've got an interesting episode to go over.
We're going to be talking about May 10th and 11th, 2020.
I'm Dan, this is 2020.
That is Sunday and Monday of this week.
I kind of hope to throw Tuesday in as well.
Keep us super up to date.
Couldn't do it.
It was just too much.
There is so much going on on these episodes, and Alex is wrong about so much in so many different ways.
If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoyed the show, I'd like to support what these gents do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show, we would appreciate it, or if you'd like to, please do feel free to take that generosity and send it over to a local charity in your area that helps people in need.
But I should also say that, speaking of knowledgefight.com and people who are supporting the show, I believe sometime today, on Wednesday, as you're listening to this episode...
Just on our homepage, knowledgefight.com, there will be a streaming player of a Q&A thing that you and I did where we answered some audience questions.
I feel like I have to get through every coconut one I can find and be disappointed and horrified before I treat myself to something so wonderful as Pineapple Passion.
So, the way he tells this story about Sweden, there's an arrangement where if you agree to take an implantable microchip, you can get free bus rides.
What he's referring to is a pilot program that a train company called SJ tried in 2017, where people could use implantable chips to store their electronic train tickets on this chip.
I found an article about this in the Independent, and this line seems particularly relevant.
Yeah, people who are already kind of into body mods, and they're just like, hey, if you're already here, let's try this out, and you guys can try it out, and then we're good.
The biohacking idea took root in startup companies, with the amp plant being offered to be used as an optional way to access buildings, and was specifically designed to not be able to be tracked.
A 2017 article in the Washington Post is really clear that the chip, quote, has no built-in power supply and can't send signals about its position.
Obviously, there are concerns one could have about what the technology could grow into in the future and the challenges it could present in terms of privacy, but this basic tech doesn't seem to be that effective in terms of being the evil New World Order Mark of the Beast that Alex wants to present it as.
So anyway, these 2,000 or so people already have implanted chips, and this train company decided to test if they could use them to store tickets.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
want to get one of these chips, there's still tons of other ways you can buy tickets to ride and do all the other things that the chip enables you to do, like get into buildings.
I'm always fascinated by how terrified these people are of...
of a computer chip and yet at the same time they're carrying around a phone that can be remotely turned on without their knowledge that they're saying.
A July 2019 article in the New York Post estimated that approximately 4,000 people in Sweden had gotten this chip implant by that point, and I have no idea where Alex is getting his 10,000 in Stockholm numbers from.
I would assume he's just exaggerating it from headlines like, quote, thousands of Swedes are inserting microchips under their skin from NPR.
The story about what Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed is something completely different.
He's suggested that as a part of reopening after the coronavirus, Israel should put chips in all school children, which would then make beeping noises if they got too close to each other, which presumably would help with enforcing social distancing.
Experts have roundly rejected the idea, saying it's practically unfeasible, very likely legally impossible, and wouldn't achieve the desired result, even if it were possible to implement.
It seems, from what I can tell, that this proposal is not going to get off the ground.
And a point brought up by cyber resilience expert Enot Mehran in an article in the Jerusalem Post, he kind of makes clear why.
Quote, Can the state take responsibility for that?
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There are a ton of reasons, including concerns like that, why this would be a very unwise system for a state to put in place.
And until I see evidence of the contrary, this kind of seems like a world leader blowing hard about dumb ideas about how they envision returning to some kind of normalcy.
Yeah.
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And let's not forget that just back in January, Netanyahu was, quote, charged with bribery and fraud and breabody.
I mean, with the old Vikings, a lot of the Viking tribes, when a man died, they would take his wife and sometimes his daughters, because they owned them, and they would tie them up on a boat, a ship, and send them out in the water on fire together so they could go to Valhalla together.
So, just to be clear, Alex's reason for the cultures all doing this is because interdimensional demons are telling them to sacrifice humans for their pleasure or something.
There were some people who had funeral pyres and boats on the sea, but the historical record tends to indicate that these were reserved for really important people.
The different groups that are all lumped in as Viking were not a uniform culture, but most people were cremated or just barren.
typically however boats were really important symbol in their culture representing safe passage to the afterlife so people would often be buried with parts of their boats or even cooler their burial mounds would be made to resemble ships themselves who that is fun this was far more common than the funeral at sea, but the funeral at sea is what's always depicted in movies.
So someone who only watches movies and decides that studying, you know, that That's basically the same thing.
You probably think that it's super common and what they did for everybody.
Yeah.
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This thematic touch where the Norse dead is put on a boat and then they shoot fire arrows at it, like Alex is describing.
So one of the difficulties on this subject is the actual written history, the record about Viking peoples is limited.
So there's a bit of uncertainty about what the precise reasons were for why they did the things they did in terms of funeral rituals.
It's a really diverse set of funeral rituals.
A lot of them seem to involve chaos.
So it's really tough to know exactly what was going on.
There may have been some instances of Norsemen being buried with their wives, like murdered, you know, but what was far more common was them killing slaves to be buried with the person to help them on their trip to the afterlife, which is something that you unfortunately do see in a lot of older cultures.
Also, there's no reason for Alex just to think that women were property in Viking communities.
There's strong archaeological evidence that women were in fact not property.
There have been merchant scales found in women's graves, which indicates that they were involved in trading and thus allowed to have some sort of autonomous life.
Additionally, in 1904, the remains of the Ulfsberg ship were found in Vestfold, Norway.
The ship was a funeral vessel which served as the burial site for two important Norse women who died around 834 CE.
This is like a particularly large boat casket, 70 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 30 feet high.
So it gives the strong evidence that these were women who had a particularly important position in their community, which Alex would not think is possible because he's only seen movies and TV shows.
And maybe played the Witcher, because that sort of Viking-ish, the Skellige Islands.
They have that whole thing where they burn a boat.
So, the story here is that this guy named, this lawyer named Ty Clevenger, he's come out and he's made some claims regarding Seth Rich that he's failed to substantiate in any way.
His first claim is that he's been told that the NSA or other related agencies are in possession of communications between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks.
There's no evidence provided for this claim, but that's never stopped Alex from believing something before.
Clevenger, he claims that, quote, several high-ranking FBI and NSA officials have seen the correspondence between Rich and WikiLeaks firsthand, to which I say, prove it.
So Clevenger goes on to claim that he has a recording of Seymour Hersh talking to one of his clients and claiming that he spoke to someone at the FBI who confirmed emails between Rich and WikiLeaks.
This recording is not available on the InfoWars article about this, nor the National File, one that I think Alex is referring to.
So this seems to be a conspiracy theorist taking threads that have existed from the beginning of the Seth Rich bullshit and pretending that they're new.
The Seymour Hersh thing was a claim that goes back to at least 2017 when Hersh himself debunked it.
One of the OG Seth Rich conspiracists, Ed Botowski, who's a Trump associate and donor, said he, quote, became convinced that the FBI had a report concluding that Seth Rich's laptop showed that he had contacts with WikiLeaks after speaking to the legendary reporter Seymour Hirsch, who was also investigating Rich's death.
According to the transcripts in the lawsuit, Botowski says Hirsch had an FBI source who confirmed the report.
That's from a 2017 thing.
NPR interviewed Hirsch about this, and he said, quote, I hear gossip.
And I know that because I found a July 2019 blog post on the website Lawflog, which was written by Ty Clevenger himself, where he discusses how Ed Butowski is one of his clients.
Another reason that I'm kind of worried about Clevenger's work is because he also said in this post about the Seth Rich stuff, new, new stuff.
Back to the NSA.
Former NSA officials Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe are prepared to testify that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks could not have been obtained via hacking.
This is a huge problem because Bill Binney has walked back that claim.
And from everything I can tell, he would not testify to that in court because he was shown that his assertions about download speeds were completely wrong.
This, again, is another element of these claims being made by Clevenger that just seems to be the old Seth Rich conspiracy shit being reintroduced and pretending that it all hasn't already been discredited.
This is pretty sad, and honestly, we've done this already, so I'm not going to waste my time watching Alex pretend there's new information here.
Alex better be fucking careful, though, because this is a topic that has led to a number of people being sued already, and the family of Seth Rich does not seem thrilled that people are keeping this alive.
And one of the ways he's, you know, distracted attention, I understand already we're all over the place, and that's because this episode is one of the rare instances where Alex is throwing spaghetti at the wall.
In the 2017-2018 legislative session, the New York State Senate passed Bill 6666, which, quote, relates to authorizing the care and treatment of injured employees by duly licensed and certified acupuncturists under the Workers' Compensation Program.
Governor Cuomo ended up vetoing this bill, though, so does that mean that Cuomo was fighting the devil?
Let's not get bogged down into it, because this shit runs deep.
Who could forget about the deep-seated Satanism in 2018's U.S. House of Representatives Bill, H.R. 6666?
Or as you might remember it, quote, the bill to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to grant to states and local governments easements and rights of way over federal land within Gateway National Recreation Area for construction, operation, and maintenance of projects for control and prevention of flooding and shoreline erosion.
This is a presidentially appointed position, and Trump's guy, Alex Azar, is currently in that role.
If this were some kind of a nefarious thing where this bill was meant to facilitate evil, it literally could only be done by the action of the person Trump hired and could fire.
Already, after just the first line of this act, you can see how any conspiracy about this is mostly based on the bill number, not on content.
This is a very short bill, but Alex isn't a big reader.
If he's going to complain about some news article being four pages long, it's not like he's a guy who likes primary information.
If you read this, it's pretty clear that what this bill is about is allowing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to distribute grant money to eligible organizations that are involved in increasing our testing capacity to get to the point where it's conceivable To return safely to something resembling normal.
The part about doing in-home testing, that would be something that those entities would receive grants.
They could do this to facilitate people who are already quarantining.
You can imagine how much better a system it would be if you could get reliable testing at home as opposed to thinking you might be sick and then having to go out into public being unsure if doing so is a risk to others.
This whole conspiracy is a load of bullshit and at this point I'm weary.
I'm just weary.
It takes so little to create the appearance of something evil when you want it to be.
So there's a viral meme that's been going around about Magufuli claiming that he sent a sample of a goat, a quail, and a papaya to be tested for COVID-19, and they came back positive.
There's been absolutely no evidence provided to back up this claim, and people have been pretty quick to point out that Magu Fuli is currently facing a great deal of pressure over his handling of the virus, and this sounds like a whole lot like something someone would say if they were trying to minimize a problem they handled poorly.
So until we get some sort of an evidence of this, or maybe someone replicating this in a controlled environment, I think it's probably a Tanzanian president talking shit.
A July 2018 article in the Mail and Guardian discusses Magufuli's government's practice of intimidating journalists, with reports of them, quote, being threatened, assaulted, and kidnapped.
In 2017, Magufuli began shutting down media operations that were not to his liking, including five prominent TV stations and the Swahili-language newspaper Mawiyo.
He introduced a $920 license that the government required bloggers to obtain to be able to post things online, licenses that the government can revoke if the writers post content that they disapprovaled.
So, the story about the 300 people at a Tyson plant testing positive doesn't actually make the argument Alex is claiming it does.
For one, if the tests just say you're positive, if you've had a cold in the last decade or whatever, why did only 300 out of 2,000 test positive?
Introducing the idea that some tests are always being positive and some not is going to be an additional layer of conspiracy here that I don't think Alex is ready or able to prove at all.
I'm not positive exactly what plant he's talking about, unfortunately, because there are a number of them.
There are a number of situations similar to this or along these lines.
So he's talking about a Tyson plant, that's for sure.
And I should tell you that Business Insider reported on Monday that, quote, at least 4,585 Tyson workers in 15 states have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and 18 have died.
That's the reality that Alex is spinning into propaganda as a narrative.
It's pretty important not to lose sight of that.
These arguments are ghoulish, and even if the numbers are accurate, they don't make the case he thinks they do.
So, Hugh said that he's talking about a Tyson plant here, but later in the episode, we find out that he thinks it's the same thing as a pork plant in Missouri, which isn't run by Tyson.
This is a story that was about a plant that was run by Triumph Foods.
And Alex conveniently ignores an update about that story when he covers it.
And that is that one of the employees who was tested positive, who was a man in his 40s, is now dead.
Alex is hanging on the asymptomatic thing here to argue that none of these people are actually sick and it's all a charade.
And I feel like if this guy, who's unidentified in the stories that I found about it, but he wants to sue Alex, maybe this might be a fun way to do it.
Really, you have to understand that this COVID-19 thing is the launch of the New World Order takeover.
So everything else is just a side issue.
I mean, in Georgia.
The original police report said that somebody had been robbing houses, taking fishing equipment, stealing four-wheelers, and that this dude went into the house, and they saw him, and then they got in a fistfight with him, and they shot the guy.
I think that's too much lethal force, and I wouldn't have done it, but that's what happens when people look like they're robbing houses, and the media is trying to make a race war out of this.
Do I think these guys need to go to prison for what they did?
So the way Alex is presenting this, if you didn't know what he was talking about, it kind of sounds like he's describing a police shooting of somebody who they thought was suspected of breaking into houses.
That's not the case.
In reality, Arbery was shot by Travis McMichael, whose dad used to be a cop but is not anymore.
McMichael and his dad chased down Arbery, who they decided was a suspect for break-ins that had happened in the neighborhood.
This was not excessive lethal force being used by police.
It was a murder that is being justified by appeals to racism.
In the police report, the elder McMichael claimed that he saw Arbery out jogging and decided that he must be a burglar.
This makes sense, considering that he wasn't carrying anything, he was in jogging clothes, and it was broad daylight.
From the report, quote, This story is contradicted by video that has been released of the altercation, which clearly shows Arbery trying to jog around the McMichaels' truck, at which point a shot is fired.
Immediately after that, you see Travis McMichael outside the truck in a bit of a lockup with Arbery, after which there are two more shots.
The varying timeline of events and number of shots between McMichael's version of the story and the video is something that I find particularly troubling.
And the fact that McMichael is a former cop leads me to believe that he should have a lot of training in the field of reporting events.
It's one thing for a random person in the heat of the moment to get some major details wrong.
That does happen.
It's something else entirely for a former cop to get basic details of an event wrong.
So, Arbery was killed on February 23rd, and there was no arrest until May 7th.
Then, on May 9th, a video was released that appeared to show Arbery walking up to a house under construction, looking around, then leaving.
This video has been used by all the, let's call them racists, to argue that Arbery had it coming, and that the McMichaels were well within their rights to kill him.
Personally, I've done way worse things at construction sites and no one ever killed me over it.
I'll say that full disclosure.
Growing up in the Midwest, I think there might be a fairly common experience of fucking around on construction sites.
So the argument seems to be that because Arbery looked around a house under construction, the McMichaels had probable cause to do a citizen's arrest, but that doesn't really make sense.
They didn't actually see him commit any crimes, so that would be a pretty flimsy defense here, I think.
What could easily make sense, you know, as a curious person looking around while maybe in a cool-down on their jog becomes proof of criminality in this case, and it's hard not to think that a racial component has something to do with that.
Even if the McMichaels weren't acting from a place of racism, the people bending over backwards to defend them, people like Millie Weaver, certainly are.
This is a horrible tragedy, and there is a new investigation going on into the matter, and we'll see what happens with that.
For now, I want you to take note of how Alex discusses this case and compare it to how he spent month after month yelling about how Katie Steinle was murdered because she was white, and the immigrant couldn't stand that he couldn't be with her.
Think about how Alex promoted rallies against immigration in the name of Steinle and set Owen Schroer out to cover them.
It's important to recognize these differences, because they are the places you see Alex's racism on full display.
He's too savvy to say the N-word or talk about hating non-white people openly, but you can see clearly how differently he engages with situations depending on the races involved.
If there's a case of a non-white person accidentally discharging a gun and the bullet ricochets and hits a white woman, it's a case of a brutal murder that was done because the victim was white.
If there's a case of two white men chasing down a black man they've decided is a criminal, then shooting him, it's a situation where Alex wouldn't have done it himself, but they didn't do anything wrong because the guy took a swing.
This is how his racism is on full display.
He's too smart to make it too obvious.
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Well, I condemn the way they did it, but was it illegal?
So, Alex, you know, I don't know if you remember this, but since the coronavirus situation has popped up, a number of times Alex has seen videos and he has decided that shit's real.
Alex has seen some videos that are making the rounds online that purported to show, quote, the aftermath of a deadly COVID-19 vaccination trial in New Guinea.
This was a video, simply put, it was a fraud.
Someone took already existing video of people in New Guinea protesting after some children had allegedly gotten sick from a vaccine, and they claimed this footage was related to research and testing of a new COVID-19 vaccine.
Well, the actual video is from March 2019, on a news station called Gangam.
The actual news report was about a community displeasure after a few children experienced mild side effects like dizziness and fever after being in a, quote, drug treatment program to reduce the prevalence and intensity of the parasitic infection, schistomyosis, also known as snail fever.
Gangan's editor-in-chief Sekou Jamal Pandasa told Reuters, quote, The editorial staff of the Gangan RTV group notes with deep regret that some internet users have been allowing themselves since Monday, April 6, 2020, to use one of our old reports to make people believe that there, in recent days, cases of discomfort due to a vaccination campaign in schools in Dubreka.
We would like to point out that the report was produced on March 18, 2019.
We invite you to refrain from such games during this sensitive period marked by a global health crisis.
This makes me think, like I said, of all the times Alex has said he just knows when he sees a video if it's real or not.
He just knows!
The spirit knows!
Here's the reality.
The spirit doesn't know shit.
He's a lazy propagandist and he falls for hoaxes like this regularly, which he then reports to his audience as fact, because he wants to.
They conform to his narratives and thus they feel true to him.
It's really frustrating that it is an airtight defense to say they're doing what we're doing while you're doing it.
Like, it really...
Because all the time he's like, oh, they're sending out all these hoax videos and all of this shit is all fake and the media is all liars and all that shit.
Also, New Guinea has nothing to do with guinea pigs.
New Guinea is an island north of Australia, in Micronesia.
Guinea pigs are likely named for their association with Guinea, an old name for the area in Africa around the Gulf of Guinea.
And in the 1500s, Guinea was a pretty general term that would be used to describe exotic, far-off places across the sea.
There's no real consensus among scholars about exactly how the guinea pig got its name, but one thing that absolutely no one thinks is that it has anything to do with New Guinea.
This is just another thing that Alex is making up to sound smart for his audience, but it's based on nothing.
In that clip, you heard him report on a hoax video as real, then make up a piece of trivia about guinea pigs, which is standard operation for him.
What's crazy is, used to, you could type in, studies show vaccines lower immunity the next year.
All those are gone.
I spent an hour today.
While my children played with my wife in the pool, I wanted to be out there, but I had to find the articles, and I went and found three big studies from just a few years ago about it lowering immunity.
But folks, I had to go 50 pages deep.
I had to find old articles and link through.
It's all nothing, but there is no side effects.
Vaccines are perfect.
No one ever got hurt.
They're totally good.
It's all lies.
And all these fake doctors and their little lab coats.
When I say fake, they're fake people.
In their little outfits telling you, oh, vaccines are perfect, there's no side effects, everything's wonderful, oh my god, it's the worst pandemic on earth, all this emotional crap.
Oh, man, I'm so sick of all these fake doctors out here.
They act like they're your friend, you hang out with them, and then you find out the next week they've been talking shit about you with their other real friends.
So this is pretty difficult for me, because Alex claims that he found all these studies that he used to be able to find really easily, but now it takes them forever, but he also didn't post any of them on his website or provide literally any indication of how you're supposed to go and find them yourself.
Because of that, I really don't know what claims Alex is making or what to go on.
In searching Infowars' website, there's a number of articles about immunity issues and vaccines, many of which are just things that Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote and Alex is reposting.
In these cases, the claim of weakened immune systems has to do with vaccinating children and the assertion that this, quote, So badly weakened their immune system that they were dying in droves from unrelated infections.
This is based on a 2017 study published on eBiomedicine, which, taken at face value, claims that children studied had a five times higher mortality if they had received the diphtheria tetanus pertussis vaccine compared to unvaccinated children.
These were children vaccinated between 1984 and 1987, so this isn't even a study about the currently used DTP vaccine, but leaving that aside, there are some problems with this study that folks have pointed out which make its conclusion not entirely reliable.
The first is that the study involves a very small sample group.
There were only 1,057 children total in the study, which is not enough to generalize conclusions about vaccine effectiveness or side effects on.
The biggest problem, however, is that there's nothing in the study that actually shows that any of the children's deaths had anything to do with the vaccine.
These are all cause death numbers, which means that the deaths could have been from drowning or some other accident, and they'd still be factored into the rates.
And this makes the conclusions very difficult to apply generally.
Other studies have not come to the same conclusion, and the argument that vaccines lower your immunity to things other than what the vaccine is targeting, they've been pretty roundly rejected by science.
A 2018 report in JAMA, quote, found no statistically significant differences in the level of immunity against non-vaccine targeted infections between their control and experimental groups.
There's another argument about vaccines lowering immunity that unsurprisingly comes from Andrew Wakefield.
This one is basically that when you use vaccines, you put part of your immune response into hyperaction while the other part is not used and thus is weakened.
The basic gist here is that he's saying that you get better immunity by dealing with things naturally, so you should get measles if you want to be immune to it, and if you take a shortcut of vaccines, it'll hurt your cell-mediated response-related immunity.
This is nonsense and no one in the medical field takes it seriously.
Sincerely, I'm not sure what precise claim Alex is trying to make, but in trying to sort it out, it's not too hard to find two separate similar ideas, which are both bullshit, being pushed by luminaries of the anti-vax propaganda world, which are very easily debunked ideas.
Vaccines do not lower your immunity, and no one is taking studies off the internet.
Alex can't find these studies because they probably weren't there to begin with.
I imagine he just read some headlines ten years ago and then kept yelling about it and eventually embellished it into being a prestigious study from the most reputable journal known to man, and now when he goes and tries to find it, shockingly nothing comes up.
This next clip is one of the reasons that, like, I mean, I hadn't heard this episode when we put out our episode on Monday where Project Camelot talked to a super soldier.
One of the Bourne Supremacy movies, the Origin one, I forget the name of it, is very accurate and got into some really secretive research that's been going on since the 70s.
But it's now public, that they can have viruses.
They're tailored to only eat certain receptors in the brain.
And they do tests on these to eat the receptors that say you have a governor where you can really bench press 1,000 pounds but you can only bench press 400 pounds.
Or you can really squat 2,000 pounds but you're a weight lifter and you think you can't so you can only squat 700.
I'm not sure what secret research Alex imagines he's going on as revealed in these movies, but I want to talk a little bit about the real-world research on the subject he's talking about that kind of shows what he's talking about to be childish nonsense.
There's a phenomenon known as hysterical strength, where archetypally, you know, it's presented as someone raising up a car to get someone, you know, save someone who's trapped underneath.
It's the idea that in moments of severe need, we find ourselves capable of doing things we didn't realize we were capable of.
Naturally, this is something that's almost impossible to study in a controlled setting.
How could you reliably create the conditions that would be needed to produce this response in a person while controlling for other variables?
Basically, you can't.
But researchers who work with muscles kind of understand the basic idea without needing to trap a test subject's loved one under a car.
So scientists who work with muscles understand this stuff.
Like, for instance, you use exactly as much muscle as you need to open your fridge.
But if you're doing something that requires more, your body adjusts to it.
Like, if you're carrying up a bunch of groceries up a flight of stairs, your muscles allocate more to suit those needs.
From an article in the BBC, quote, Why do we keep so much in reserve?
Safety, essentially.
If we were to exert our muscles to or beyond their absolute maximum, we could tear muscle tissue, ligaments, tendons, and break bones, leaving us in dire straits.
That governor in your brain is there because if you were allowed to expend all the available energy your body has to use, you'd probably have died long ago.
or at very least you'd be completely debilitated due to all the bodily damage you would have suffered.
The people who are lifting cars are only lifting a small part of the car, while two or three wheels remain on the ground distributing the weight.
Plus, their bodies are full of adrenaline, and the state of shock will generally disappear.
dull any pain that they might be feeling from the heavier lift.
And even so, they probably feel pretty fucking sore afterwards.
These parts of your brain can be overridden, you know, like that governor.
Like in cases when you're trying to escape certain death, your brain realizes that in order to stay alive, higher risks need to be taken.
On the other side of that coin, this part of your brain also appears to be overridden when you're on meth or PCP, which may play a role in explaining the seemingly heightened strength of people on those drugs.
In each of these cases, however, you're going to be pretty fucked up on the other side of doing whatever it is free of this governor in your brain.
If there's some kind of a magical thing that allows super soldiers like Jason Bourne to use more of his strength than normal people's brains allow them to, he could maybe operate on the level of an elite athlete.
If a person, like a human person, were to do what Alex is imagining, their bodies would not be able to handle it.
There are just physiological realities that he's pretending do not exist.
The way I would put it is this.
If your life is at risk, you could jump down a big drop, break your ankle, and then run a mile to safety.
But when you get to safety, your ankle is still going to be broken, and it's going to hurt like hell because you just ran a mile on it.
But then again, what the fuck do I know?
I haven't watched this Bourne movie, or as Alex puts it, read up on secret research.
Psychologists and psychiatrists know at the high levels, not your pop psychologists and psychiatrists, that if you pre-program somebody and they've seen something in the comfort of their home, that a decade later when they actually see it happen, they'll be comfortable with it because they were eating chips and pizza and having sex with their girlfriend while they learned about something horrible, so their brain files in an area that's non-threatening.
That's why my dad's dad saw a lot of combat in World War II.
And they'd be in a movie when he was a little kid that had violence.
He'd say, we're leaving.
It wasn't because he couldn't handle violence.
He'd seen a bunch of violence and starving people and arms and legs blown off.
He didn't think it was funny.
But when you've never seen real violence and you see a bunch of simulated murder, your brain starts thinking it's funny because your brain didn't pay any consequence for it.
So now when you're hit with the real thing, you don't know what hit you.
So first of all, I'm going to need to see Alex's citation on this stuff from the high-end psychologists who are not pop psychologists.
I'll review his information when he tells me what he's actually talking about and where it's coming from in any meaningful way.
Beyond that, that clip is fascinating, because I really think it highlights how poorly Alex's brain tracks ideas.
It begins with him claiming that there are these high-end non-pop psychologists who, you know, they know that if you see something on TV and then you encounter it later, your brain will associate it with the memory of being at home with pizza, so you'll see it as good.
I can definitely tell you that it is not true, from my personal experience in the last few weeks.
I've seen people get hit by cars a fuckton in movies and TV shows, sometimes dramas, and sometimes played for humor.
It doesn't affect me that much in a movie.
When I was walking to the store the other day, a driver turning right didn't see me when I had the walk signal, and I was legit seconds away from getting run over.
I heard the car accelerating, and the split second as my brain was putting it all together, you know, is definitely not what I would call associated with being at home eating pizza.
My reaction was quite different.
Though I'd seen people get hit by cars many times in fiction, this was very different because it was in real life, and my adrenaline rushed, as I was considering jumping on the hood or trying to dive backwards.
Thankfully, the driver saw me at the last second, hit the brakes, and nothing happened, but as I was walking the next block, my body was full of that rush you get after encountering danger.
Being exposed to those things on TV and movies did not have a desensitizing effect on me, primarily because I know the difference between real life and movies.
From this idea, Alex pivots to talking about his grandfather, who didn't want his children to watch violent things in movies and TV because he'd been in World War II.
An argument can be made that this is the exact opposite of the point Alex was trying to make.
He's saying that seeing X on TV desensitizes you to X in real life, whereas in this example, Alex's grandfather saw X in real life and it made him hypersensitive to seeing it or his kids seeing it on TV.
Whether or not this hypersensitivity was driven by a fear that the children would become desensitized to violence, that's another matter.
But even if it is the case, this is still a pretty shitty example for Alex to come up with, because it's thematically disconnected from the point he's trying to make.
From there, Alex makes the jump to arguing that if you see simulated violence on TV, you think it's funny, so you think that murder's funny in real life.
He then weirdly claims that this is because you didn't see any consequences for the fictional violence you saw on TV, which is weird.
That's bizarre.
I don't know who he's hanging out with to get the idea that a large number of people think real murder is funny, but that's a foreign concept to me.
Someone who almost exclusively hangs out with and communicates with people who have seen simulated violence on TV.
Most people intuitively understand the difference between reality and fictional portrayals of things, and instinctively they react differently to them.
The same person who could tolerate seeing the depiction of a murder in a horror movie, or even enjoy it in the context of the movie, would react completely differently.
Whenever Brad Pitt's character gets hit by, like, 12 different cars all at the same time?
And it's played for laughs like they're...
It's the weirdest scene in a movie that I think I've ever seen.
Like, meet Brad Pitt and what's-her-face, like, longingly look back at each other, each expecting the other one to look back, and it goes back and forth, like, four different times.
And then Brad Pitt just walks into oncoming traffic and gets hit once, bounces up in the air, gets hit again by another car, bounces up in the air, continues getting hit, like, three or four times.
And then the scene is basically over and they just move on.
So, there are some studies that suggest that there is a desensitization effect that violent media can have on children and adolescents, but the extent of its effect is almost impossible to pin down precisely.
Consider for a second how you would even go about trying to set up that study ethically, like to really track that.
There are some correlations that people have found, but they're a far cry from the effect that Alex seems to think that movies and TV have on a random person.
He's acting like if you see a bomb go off in a movie and you encounter a bomb in your daily life, you're like, oh, it's like that movie.
I really do think that he doesn't realize that this is something that most people can differentiate, since his confusion around why other people can't see what he sees does seem genuine.
That frustration he manifests does seem like someone who's like, it's so clear to me, why don't you get it?
I'm honestly starting to work on a little bit of a pet theory that this is one of the more strongly correlating things throughout these conspiracy worlds.
The inability or unwillingness differentiated between reality and fiction runs so strongly on Infowars, many of the associated people.
And Project Camelot and the quote-unquote experts they have, it seems to be one of the defining characteristics.
So Alex has that rant, and it leads to how we end the 10th, and of course, it's familiar territory.
The first is that Alex decided this Bill Gates wears pink bit was so good that he decided to wear a pink sweater on air himself so he could riff about it.
The second part that's hilarious here is that Alex is saying that if Hitler wore pink, he'd be non-threatening.
Alex claims to be a military historian, but somehow he doesn't realize that the U.S. Army officer's winter service uniform, starting in the 1920s through 1958, was known as the, quote, pink and greens.
The U.S. Army officer uniform during that very time that they were fighting against Hitler literally had pink in the name of it.
And as I've always said, if Hitler wore a pink uniform, he would have won World War II because people would have bowed down and said, somebody wearing pink is nothing but good.
That's why Bill and Melinda Gates always wear pink in public.
It's why.
Mark Zuckerberg's gotten rid of his characteristic gray or black t-shirt, and he now wears pink sweaters under his mentor, Bill Gates.
There are exactly two pictures of Gates in a pink sweater, and they are both from his 2015 TED Talk about how we aren't ready for the next pandemic that we might face.
At least one of these is from a site that's heavily trying to insinuate that this is proof of a conspiracy, which makes me think that Alex might just be seeing a bunch of bullshit conspiracy blogs posting a picture from Gates' five-year-old TED Talk.
Which is him making Alex think that he's constantly wearing a pink sweater.
As for Zuckerberg, I have no idea where Alex saw him wearing a pink sweater, but I also don't care.
This is just a super weird hang-up Alex has about men wearing colors he thinks are feminine.
We better pray that he never finds out that Trump wore a pink striped tie to the coronavirus press conference back on May 5th.
Or that Trump sells a bunch of different pink ties.
If we've reached the point where Alex thinks good, compelling content is just naming off his enemies and discussing the nefarious implications of what they're wearing recently, this show is past its expiration date.
This is not hard-hitting stuff.
Also, just for fun, I tried to find pictures of Ron Paul wearing pink shirts, and it was super easy.
Same for Nigel Farage.
I will say that I couldn't find any pictures of Yair Bolsonaro in pink, but that totally makes sense, since he's as invested in performative masculinity as Alex is.
It shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that Warren Buffett is almost always photographed in a suit.
It's kind of his thing.
Well, you know, I can't find any pictures of him wearing pink outside of the possibility of some pink dress shirt and a suit or possibly a pink tie.
Also, he doesn't get photographed all the time with ice cream, but he definitely has a few times.
And the reason isn't to make him look like a fun, innocent child.
It's because Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that he owns, owns Dairy Queen.
Also, Warren Buffett didn't get caught money laundering in 2010.
But there is a real thing here that Alex is misrepresenting.
In 2010, the DEA conducted...
And concluded a 22-month investigation that had uncovered billions of dollars that had been laundered by drug cartels through Wachovia Bank, which by that point in 2010 had been bought by Wells Fargo, of which Berkshire Hathaway is the fifth largest shareholder.
Wells Fargo didn't acquire Wachovia until 2008, so this is definitely a pre-existing issue to Berkshire's involvement with the bank.
There's definitely some shady shit going on with Wachovia, particularly during the 2004-2007 time frame, but to imagine that somehow Warren Buffett was involved in that is ludicrous.
Alex is just desperate to lash out at his imagined enemies to the point where he'll just outright make false accusations, because he's been trained that there are no consequences for that.
Buffett is too busy to sue Alex for this clear instance of defamation, and Alex knows it.
There's just enough reality to the story that Wachovia did get in trouble for laundering drug money in 2010, and Alex knows that his listeners will find a headline about that and decide that Alex's story about it is true.
He's just the most pampered of radio personalities when you get right down to it.
He has the easiest fucking job imaginable.
Too frustrating and time-consuming to sue him, and just a trained audience full of people who will just be like, Oh, he is right!
So, last week, the San Antonio City Council passed a resolution that just roundly denounced the use of the terms Chinese virus and Kung Fu virus as being racist.
At no point in the resolution does it say you'll be arrested for using those terms.
It's really more just a declaration of a commitment to protect the safety and dignity of the Asian residents of the city.
Alex doesn't bring this up here, but there's also a bit in this resolution about anti-Semitism, which has been mocked by a bunch of people on the extreme right wing.
They feign ignorance and pretend that the city council is just crazy.
How's saying Chinese virus anti-Semitic?
These loony left-wing safe space nuts are out of control.
And the resolution perfectly spells that out if you actually read it.
In the preamble to the resolution, they include, quote, whereas the Jewish community has been targeted with blame, hate, anti-Semitic tropes, and conspiracy theories about their creating, spreading, and profiting from COVID-19.
The city council was making a point of calling out the nature of propaganda surrounding COVID-19, which is good, but it also opens the door to the very people relying on those anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories to play dumb and pretend they don't get the point.
I've spent in my head all day writing this whole, like, the only reason that you associate diseases with a certain group of people is to set the groundwork for a pogrom later on.
So, I don't think that the World Health Organization has ever said that the virus didn't originate in China.
It's just that calling it the China virus is a meaningless name that can only be used to stigmatize, so they discourage it.
In the preamble to the resolution, they say, quote, That's the only time the World Health Organization comes up, and it makes perfect sense what they're saying.
Alex is lying, saying that the San Antonio City Council is saying that the World Health Organization says the virus didn't originate in China because he's a liar, and that lie works better for him.
So, if you're keeping score, in the 16-second clip that we listened to, Alex lied about the idea that this resolution was a bill to arrest people for saying Chinese virus, and followed that up with a lie about the World Health Organization saying the virus didn't originate in China.
So Alex gets to reading some headlines here, and you can tell from the way he's delivering these headlines that, man, you do not have a rebuttal for any of this shit.
See, that's Alex Jones right there, doing a stupid mocking voice about a public health crisis because he has literally no other tools at his disposal to address these stories.
He also can't ignore them, and I think he thought he'd get more mileage out of the pink sweater than he did.
The one about the virus rates in Germany, I'm just going to leave that alone.
Not because I don't care, but because it's kind of complicated and it's secondary to what Alex is talking about.
Alex knows that he can't not address the fact that Mike Pence's staffer, Katie Miller, tested positive for COVID-19.
It's too big of a story, and the possible implications of it are things that he doesn't want to have to play catch-up with later.
If she was infectious, the number of people who were possibly exposed to the virus include most of the executive branch leadership.
Miller's husband is Stephen Miller, a high-level advisor to Trump, and she works for Pence.
This could be a disease vector that touches a whole lot of folks, and some of them, like Trump, are in high-risk populations with the virus.
It's not something that Alex can really ignore.
Alex knows he has to touch on this, but there's not much he can do.
If he says that it's the globalists infected her to try to get to Trump, this is basically an assassination attempt.
And I think that he knows that this is an escalation of his rhetoric that he probably shouldn't make.
If he's saying there's a current attempt on the president's life, he's basically greenlighting all of his gone weirdo listeners to do whatever they feel like they need to do.
And even he knows that's dangerous.
So what are you left with?
There's no real option for covering that story other than to read it in a mocking tone.
This is like a bully who has no comeback, who resorts to doing a dumb voice like that makes a point.
And that last story there is where this pattern is really on full display.
Alex has absolutely no good explanation for why the Trump administration buried that CDC report.
And the way he's talking about it makes it clear that Alex doesn't actually even understand the story.
Alex seems to think that it's a story that has something to do with projections and graphs.
In reality, the report that Trump shelved was, quote, detailed advice from the nation's top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic.
Presumably, Alex and all of his friends, their goal is to reopen the country, so it seems weird that the CDC came out with a detailed plan to help communities do just that, and then the White House shelved the report on April 30th.
So the Associated Press obtained emails that proved that the head of the CDC, Redfield, had approved this report and sent it to the White House for approval, but they killed it.
And a, quote, staffer at the CDC was told, we would not even be allowed to post the decision trees.
On May 7th, the Associated Press reported on this buried document, which looks really bad.
What looks even worse is that according to ABC News, quote, There's clear intention here, and none of it's good.
It's the sort of thing where obviously Trump wanted to reopen everything in a pretty roughshod, uncontrolled way, whereas the CDC's guidance was much more careful and measured, which would be slower and kind of a bummer.
Instead of letting the expert advice be released, they covered it up, and when what's the evidence of the report was reported on by the Associated Press, the administration tried to cover up that cover-up by demanding the report be refiled.
It's all pathetically transparent stuff, and Alex knows that he has absolutely no good argument for why Trump would act like that.
If the goal is to safely reopen the country, His actions make no sense.
So Alex comes up with a completely fictional version of the story that has to do with these narratives where he misrepresents death projections from January.
This is the best he can do.
He's reading headlines about a very serious thing, like high-level White House staffers testing positive for the virus, or Trump burying reports that could end up jeopardizing public health.
He reads them in a mocking tone.
I don't even know why he's doing the show anymore.
So Chuck Todd on Meet the Press interviewed Attorney General Barr and asked him, quote, when history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?
On the show, Barr's response was, quote, well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who's writing the history.
The full answer that Barr gave was, quote, well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who's writing the history.
But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.
It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.
I see both sides of this.
Chuck Todd very clearly did a bad job here, and misrepresented the full context of what Barr said, and it's very hard for me to imagine that wasn't a decision that he made.
So fuck him.
But that being said, even with the full context, Barr's comment is fucking chilling and scary.
His first thought is still that history is written by the winners, and then he clarifies that he thinks what he did was a good decision based on the rule of law, and that any fair history would show that.
Feels kind of like rationalization of the immediate answer that even he must have realized sounded a little bit villainous.
But while we're on the subject of things being taken out of context, I should bring up that one of the major sources of justification for the Department of Justice dropping their case against Michael Flynn has come out and said that her words were being used inappropriately as support for a conclusion she actually opposes.
Former Acting Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that includes the following, quote, The FBI had no counterintelligence reason for investigating Mr. Flynn.
It does not suggest that the FBI's interview of Mr. Flynn, which led to the false statements charge, was unlawful or unjustified.
Yeah.
The working theory, according to some legal experts, is that there was not good cause to drop the case against Flynn, but the Department of Justice came up with a weird technicality argument in order to avoid Trump trying to pardon him, which would have been a real clusterfuck.
It would have been a mess that no one in Trump's administration would want to try and do.
The Department of Justice argued that the lies that Flynn told the FBI were not material lies, which is to say that they weren't relevant to other cases, and therefore lying about those things is not a crime.
This is not a very solid argument.
And in a sane world, this would probably trigger an independent investigation into how the DOJ came to this conclusion.
Alas, we don't live in a sane world, and so here we are.
And here again, we have Alex looking up to Bill Barr.
A guy who he should absolutely, unequivocally hate, based on everything he pretends to stand for and all of the issues that his career is based on.
So we have two claims being made there, so let's look at them one at a time.
The first is that there were 15,000 flu deaths in Sweden a year.
That's a claim that Alex is making.
Data published about the 2018-2019 flu season showed that labs in Sweden only reported 13,757 total cases.
So that number he's got seems to be a little bit high.
They reported 505 of these people died within 30 days of their diagnosis.
To give you some idea of the scale.
In the 2011-2020 season, the death toll almost hit 1,000.
And from every indication I can find, Alex is just making up that number about Swedish flu deaths.
If his number were accurate and you applied that rate based on Sweden's population to the United States, we would have about 492,000 flu deaths per year, which again leads me to believe that Alex is just making this up.
Maybe he just saw that they had about 14,000 cases last year, and he's misrepresenting that and misreporting it as deaths.
Whatever the case, he's just presenting bad information to his audience authoritatively, which is lame.
Also, Alex's claim that there's no cases of flu being reported because they're all being called COVID-19 is a complete lie.
You can easily find data on the CDC's website that reflects newly reported cases of influenza that are confirmed each week.
The number is going drastically downward because flu season is pretty much over, as it usually ends around the end of March or in April.
There are still 21 new cases in Week 18 of 2020, which ended May 2nd, and 26 cases the week prior.
You can find week-by-week data for influenza-related deaths on the website, too.
Week 18 had 20 deaths, and Week 17 had 106.
If you look at their data for previous years, this is pretty much the very common pattern for flu seasons, where deaths slowly increase as the season begins, and then they gradually go down as we come to the end of the season.
This drop typically comes in week 16 to 19 of the year and sometimes a little bit earlier, so this is all very normal patterns.
Not just calling all flu deaths COVID-19.
And there's very easily available data that shows that health officials are still counting flu deaths.
Alex is just making this up because it's important for his narrative to minimize the danger of COVID-19 and because he's a lazy fucking fraud.
I think that Alex's operation is doomed to failure to begin with.
Because it doesn't mean anything.
Like, none of the stuff he's talking about goes anywhere.
It's all bullshit.
So, like, basically, if you have smart, engaged, competent people in your audience, they're gonna end up looking into the things that you say, and eventually they're gonna be like, this guy's full of shit, and they're gonna move on.
You're not going to be able to retain a decent audience of engaged, critical people in the audience.
And so now they're out of Alex's revenue stream, and that basically leaves a Constantly inward and outward flow of people who get tired of the bullshit and move along.
And the only people who really stick around are people who have been trained and coached to turn off all sort of critical thinking capabilities that they have.
And that is not...
I mean, you know, you can go for quite a while, apparently, using that as a fundraising base.
But eventually, you know, you're not going to be able to do much with it.
It's going to be diminishing returns.
And as other things happen in your life, like you get sued by everybody, that base is not going to be able to maintain the standard of living that you've become accustomed to with your million dollar studios and all this shit.
It's just not going to pan out.
This is destined to fail because it's a system that needs to continue and can't.
Fraud and manipulation that Alex engages in, and that's not going to be a base that is going to sustain you forever, and furthermore, it's not going to be a base that's going to really do anything.
And there was a certainty, kind of, that Alex would be able to do that while he was the big premier game in the conspiracy propaganda world, but he's not that anymore.
His ability to recruit is minimized by his social media bans.
You know, the inflow has been stymied as opposed to the outflow continuing.
Like, it's just screwed.
Like, you know, when I heard him say this, like, we failed, I'm going to move to the country, that kind of thing, it's like, this is kind of, you knew this was coming, Alex.
I don't know if you play something later in the show, but I was like, I'm certain this is going to be fentanyl the dragon.
I'm certain it's going to be racist.
Whatever it is, since he's presenting it as related to the San Antonio story, I'm like, he's going to go fucking swing for the fences on some anti-Asian bigotry.
So I went to the Infowars store to try and figure out what was up with this, and as it turns out, it's, quote, eight different formulas, and some of these formulas are double pills.
The flex and joint support, the nootropic brain, and immune support formulas are each two pills, whereas the other six formulas are a single pill.
If you do some simple math, that is not 13 pills, that is 12. There's even a visual on the website that shows each of the pills, and there's clearly 12 of them.
Alex keeps allowing him to come on the show and doesn't really fight with him about that, although he should, because based on everything Alex says, he knows that there is a virus.
It's not a fake made-up thing.
Unfortunately, every single time David Icke is on, he swings Alex.
The last time he was on, he swung Alex, and he's like, oh, you're right.
That thing that I was going to do, where I said everything that I believed was false and I agree with you, and then later, five minutes later, I'm going to completely forget that I agree with you.
Anyway, this was a wild walk through a couple days of Alex's rangy nonsense, but we have reached the end, and we'll see what happens on our next episode on Friday.
Check back on the rest of the week, see if Alex falls apart completely and disowns his show.