Today, Dan and Jordan discuss Friday's episode of the Alex Jones Show and encounter some real stupidity. In this installment, Alex misrepresents some news about a retracted study and fails to explain a skull on his desk adequately. Also, Dan takes issue with Alex's vocabulary.
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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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*Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* *Squeak* Dan and | |
| Jordan, I am sweating *Squeak* Knowledgefight.com I have great respect for Knowledgefight Knowledgefight I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys Saying we are the bad guys Knowledgefight fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
| Hello Alex, I'm a first time caller in the future. | ||
| Hey everybody, welcome back to Knowledge Fight, I'm Dan. | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| Quick question. | ||
| What up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So my bright spot for the week, or today, is that I am so moved that the audience that we have that listens to the show is so engaged in productive ways. | ||
| Like, on our last episode, I discussed how I want to get a new animal friend for when I move. | ||
| And I had a couple of theories about animals that might be in the running. | ||
| Not fully thought through or anything. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| But I got a ton of feedback. | ||
| From people about those options. | ||
| About, like, here are some of the drawbacks of those pets. | ||
| And also, a very important piece of feedback, that is, sugar gliders are not things that you should necessarily keep as pets. | ||
| They're kind of wild animals. | ||
| I was unaware of that dynamic, and so, obviously, that's off the table. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that one, and I was like, oh, okay, fair enough. | ||
| I didn't think that that was necessarily, like, a leader in the clubhouse anyway, although they are fucking cute. | ||
| Gorgeous. | ||
| And so it's led me to rethink a lot of the possibilities and come to the conclusion that maybe another cat is best because there are a lot of cats that need homes. | ||
| And that could be a more productive use of my time. | ||
| If I want another animal friend to come around to play with me and Celine... | ||
| I believe that's winning the voting as well on the Facebook page. | ||
| It makes the most sense, but then I kind of... | ||
| Somebody sent me a message. | ||
| I apologize that I don't remember your name, that sent this message. | ||
| Get a kangaroo! | ||
| No, this was a message that I read, and I immediately threw a pen across the room. | ||
| It was a suggestion to get, like, death's head cockroaches. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| No, I can't do that. | ||
| But then I started to think about it, like, I don't want a cockroach. | ||
| I don't want a cockroach. | ||
| No, probably not. | ||
| But it opened up the idea of, like, yeah, there are some bugs that you could get a terrarium. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| And so I was thinking about mantis. | ||
| A mantis? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, you're going to go for a mantis being. | ||
| Full on. | ||
| Yeah, it's like getting a mantis. | ||
| What I'm hearing is you're eventually going to start farming crickets for when the food market completely collapses, you'll be able to make little cricket bars. | ||
| And your mantis will be fine. | ||
| I don't think that that's going to be in the cards. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of broad ramifications of the choice of animal friend. | ||
| And I appreciate the audience caring enough to point some of these things out to me and guide me. | ||
| Towards making a good decision. | ||
| Oh, that's very wonderful. | ||
| As opposed to something ludicrous like I end up with a wallaby. | ||
| I would appreciate a wallaby. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Call it Rocco. | ||
| Something that would be so great and cute and lovely, but at the same time it would be abusive for me to have. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't want to ever fall into that trap. | ||
| I've always dreamt of getting a fox and those things, you just can't keep them. | ||
| Yeah, they're not domesticated. | ||
| Same thing for being a fox friend. | ||
| I want him to sit on my shoulder and... | ||
| Curl his tail around my neck and I instantly have a personality. | ||
| I think that about squirrels all the time. | ||
| But those are not things you can keep as pets. | ||
| No, no, unfortunately. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, well. | |
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So what about you? | ||
| My bright spot. | ||
| Have you ever seen the TV show Alone? | ||
| It's like a survival show, like Naked and Afraid and that kind of thing. | ||
| I know the genre, I don't know the specific show. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And, you know, ten people, they put them in a place where you can't survive and they're like, eh, let's see how long you survive. | ||
| See if you eat each other. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. | ||
| And this show is uniformly terrible. | ||
| You're just watching people starve. | ||
| But... | ||
| They make these great little shelters. | ||
| My partner and I were watching these just like other people watch HGTV. | ||
| They're like, look at that home! | ||
| We're sitting there like, how did he make that A-frame with all the moss on it? | ||
| That sounds amazing! | ||
| So, that's my bright spot. | ||
| I think you would have really liked Survivor if you had watched it early on. | ||
| If I had gotten it at the right time? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| If you'd started in season two or so. | ||
| I think season one was pretty good, but season two was really... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Yeah, I think you would have enjoyed seeing the ingenuity. | ||
| I mean, I'm positive a lot of it is sort of cheated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For effect. | ||
| Oh, the show in Alone is totally cheating. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's got to be some of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think you would have really... | ||
| If you like that, I think you would have really enjoyed Survivor's thing. | ||
| I think it's just the houses and shit. | ||
| I don't like watching people starve. | ||
| They're starving. | ||
| They make shelter. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And on Survivor, they rarely starve because they get rice and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And they do, like, immunity challenges where they kick people off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-huh. | |
| But they also do reward. | ||
| Yeah, but it's dystopian and a controlled... | ||
| Challenging environment. | ||
| Although I will say, Survivor got way out of control with some of their concepts for the breakdown of the tribes. | ||
| Kangaroos! | ||
| In later seasons, it was troubling. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But, hey. | ||
| There were the blue barracudas. | ||
| No, that was Legend of the Hill. | ||
| Silver monkeys. | ||
| That was Legend of the Hill. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It was, yes. | ||
| Sorry, my bad. | ||
| Olamec! | ||
|
unidentified
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Talking head Olamec! | |
| Most incompetent temple guards. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What do we got? | ||
| Kirk Fogg has got a fanny pack. | ||
| Want to do Double Dare? | ||
| What do we got next? | ||
| I don't remember who hosted that. | ||
| Was it Moe? | ||
| No. | ||
| That was Guts. | ||
| I just remember, the only thing I remember is Mike O'Malley's enduring appeal beyond the generations. | ||
| He started out on Nickelodeon and then he got his own TV show and shit. | ||
| Congratulations to Mike O'Malley. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He had a great career. | ||
| Congratulations to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So let's take a moment, Jordan, before we get down to business on today's episode where we'll be discussing last Friday's episode, June 5th, 2020. | ||
| And this is 2020. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| And before we nail down into that, let's take a moment to say thank you to some folks who signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| So first, SC. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, SC. | ||
| Thank you, Southern California, South Carolina, SC. | ||
| What else you got? | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next, Eric with a K. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Eric. | ||
| Thank you, Eric. | ||
| Next, Jacob with a K. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Jacob. | ||
| Thank you, Jacob. | ||
| Next, Jenna K. Last initial K. A lot of K's going around here today. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Whoa, are you still throwing in some KKK shit right now? | ||
| I'm certainly not. | ||
| I'm just trying to spell people's names correctly. | ||
| Jenna, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Jenna! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Lunch Money from Soros. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Lunch Money from Soros. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Next, Woe S. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Woe S. Next, Philip A. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Philip A. Thank you. | ||
| Next, Eric C. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Eric. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Next, Andrea R. Thank you so much for donating on an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate that very much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| And thank you, Alex M. 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? | ||
| We gotta go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, alright? | ||
| Let's get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimp so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, Andrea, and thank you so much. | ||
| Alex. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much to the both of you. | ||
| Man, I feel really uncomfortable because how I do this is I just go through chronologically the people who donate, and you are right. | ||
| I mean, there are three Ks in a row. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| That makes me really uncomfortable. | ||
| That's a real bad time for that. | ||
| But typically, I mean, if there's no last initial and it's Eric, there are a bunch of people named Eric. | ||
| There's another person named Eric here on this list. | ||
| Wait, was that Eric with a K, C, or Eric with a C, C? | ||
| C. Okay, so there's two Cs there. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Jake. | |
| Jacob. | ||
| There's other Jacobs. | ||
| So there's a Jacob who spells his name with a K without a C. Could be Yacoub, though. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So, yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I feel very self-conscious about this. | ||
| This was in no way a clan thing. | ||
| I don't think you need to alert me. | ||
| I probably don't. | ||
| I think everybody gets it. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I was just getting in my head. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Jordan, today we got June 5th. | ||
| I was planning on trying to do his Sunday episode for this episode as well. | ||
| Trying to get us as close to current as possible. | ||
| There's just too much going on on this episode. | ||
| And also, the reality of trying to flip a Sunday episode for a Monday podcast is very difficult. | ||
| So hard. | ||
| It requires us to record at like 8 or 9 at night, and then... | ||
| It's just, I'm up all night if I'm trying to get that episode turned around in time, so we'll be able to check in on that on our next episode. | ||
| But thankfully, there's a lot of meat on these here bones on the 5th. | ||
| Oh, that's good news. | ||
| But not a whole lot of it has to do with the protests. | ||
| I can't imagine why. | ||
| It's very strange how sidelined a lot of that is for Alex on Friday. | ||
| Not really that big a deal. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| It's still light. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So Alex starts off the show and he wants to get back into the business of talking about hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| Sure, sure, right. | ||
| And trying to argue that he's right about everything. | ||
| And what's incredible is people that actually pay attention to this broadcast, they say, how are you right almost every time? | ||
| How did you know that Bill Gates put up this study three months ago that hydroxychloroquine hurts people and helps no one? | ||
| You made it up. | ||
| Well, I went and researched that it was a group that he funds that paid for it. | ||
| Then I looked at all the other studies. | ||
| By all of them, I'd looked at many. | ||
| And I talked to the doctors, and we played clips of doctors around the world saying 100% recovery rate with hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| Play those clips again. | ||
| Now it came out. | ||
| Come on, buddy. | ||
| Even the Washington Post had to admit, study pulled. | ||
| researchers retract botched anti-hydroxychloroquine study, which was used to attack Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hmm. | |
| um Gasp. | ||
| Think about how big that is. | ||
| Think about it, Jordan. | ||
| I demand you think about it. | ||
| Alright, fuck off. | ||
| One study that disagrees with him is retracted. | ||
| It's obviously a cover-up. | ||
| One study that agrees with him is retracted. | ||
| It's the inverse of those two. | ||
| Like, fuck off. | ||
| I don't need any of your, this one is, now that it's retracted, I'm vindicated bullshit. | ||
| Sure, that game is stupid, but we still do have to address this and talk about it because he's not making up that a big hydroxychloroquine study was retracted by Lancet late last week. | ||
| Due to the Guardian's reporting, I recall, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's fair enough, but the study was far from the only one that's shown that the drug is ineffective in terms of treating COVID-19. | ||
| This was not one of the early studies. | ||
| It was originally published on May 22nd, and this was the study that linked the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with the increased chance of mortality in COVID-19 patients. | ||
| The reason that the authors retracted the study was that they were basing their analysis on data that had been compiled by a company called Surgisphere, whose methods came under question. | ||
| The authors became concerned when Surgisphere apparently was uncooperative in an attempt to audit the provided data, which is ultimately always going to lead to a retraction. | ||
| Around the same time that this paper was retracted, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted another study that relied on data from Surgisphere, but it was unrelated to hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| This is clearly a story about statistical reliability more than it is about hydroxychloroquine or anyone trying to attack Trump. | ||
| One issue here is that the retraction is not the result of the data being shown to be inaccurate, just that the authors are no longer convinced that it is reliable, which are different things. | ||
| It may be the case that the underlying data is bad, or it may be fine, but since they can't stand behind it, the paper no longer meets the standards that outlets like The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine adhere to. | ||
| I can find no concrete connections between Surgisphere and Bill Gates, nor between Gates and Surgisphere's owner, Sapan Desai, so unless Alex can substantiate that, I'm left to assume he's kind of just making it up. | ||
| Another thing to keep in mind is that no matter what the reality is with this study getting retracted, it has no effect on how irresponsible Trump was being when he promoted the drug as a potential miracle cure. | ||
| Even if all science came back and did say that it was a perfect cure for COVID-19, Trump had absolutely no reason to say what he did when he did, which is the problem. | ||
| And finally, Alex is completely wrong about these studies he's referencing. | ||
| about early studies that showed promise, you know, like saying 100% accuracy. | ||
| And he just decided to look no further into it. | ||
| There's plenty of other studies that have shown, like, you shouldn't be giving this to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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On June 3rd, a very rigorously controlled study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that, quote, the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not help prevent people who had been exposed to others with COVID-19 from developing the disease. | |
| This is the first double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study that's been done on the subject, and they found that the drug had a comparable effect to a placebo. | ||
| Who did that? | ||
| Surgicube? | ||
| On June 5th, Stat News reported on a clinical trial that it just wrapped up in the UK. | ||
| One of the leads on that study, an Oxford epidemiologist, said, quote, Today's preliminary results from the recovery trial are quite clear. | ||
| Hydroxychloroquine does not reduce the risk of death among hospitalized patients with this new disease. | ||
| Some of the new data we're seeing are tending towards the impression that maybe there isn't a huge mortality risk in taking hydroxychloroquine, but there's also no medical reason to prescribe it for COVID-19. | ||
| Studies are showing that it's not effective as a preventative, nor does it have a significant effect on recovery. | ||
| There are other studies that are looking at other aspects of the drugs, possible applications and interactions with COVID-19, but it doesn't look like there's anything particularly promising here at this point. | ||
| Wait, are you telling me that making the president feel good about himself is not a medical reason to prescribe drugs? | ||
|
unidentified
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Hmm. | |
| When you put it that way, I bet Alex would argue that. | ||
| I bet he would say that the do no harm, the Hippocratic Oath has a responsibility to not harm the president's ego. | ||
| That probably would make sense. | ||
| I guess what Alex is doing here is he's trying to claim a major win or a victory. | ||
| In hindsight, Trump may not have been advocating for people to take an unnecessary medication that might kill them. | ||
| Well, when you put it that way, it sounds really bad. | ||
| The victory is that Trump was just advocating people take an unnecessary medication that has a small chance of killing them. | ||
| Yeah, see? | ||
| What a hero. | ||
| Declare victory. | ||
| Mission accomplished. | ||
| Put it on there! | ||
| Put that banner up! | ||
| Very, very interesting approach to this. | ||
| See? | ||
| It doesn't kill people, it only mostly kills them. | ||
| One study gets retracted because of these complicated reasons involving uncertainty around the sourcing of this data, and Alex is going to report that as all of everything about COVID-19 is fake, and also Bill Gates is involved in this particular retraction. | ||
| Which I can find no evidence of. | ||
| Well, Surgisphere does have a kind of evil name to a company there for it. | ||
| I think a lot of those medical companies probably have things that are sort of similarly weird. | ||
| So one of the chief problems about this is that as Alex talks more about the story about this retraction, I mean, the two retractions, he doesn't know anything about them. | ||
| The Lancet Journal and one other that published it demanded the source data. | ||
| Because the public bucked this and turns out there was none. | ||
| Mill Gates is a criminal. | ||
| He made it all up. | ||
| So this is really important. | ||
| Alex has no idea what the story is on these retractions. | ||
| He's just read a headline about them and now he's off to the races. | ||
| He doesn't know what the other journal that retracted their study was, which was the New England Journal of Medicine. | ||
| Further, he doesn't know what that New England Journal of Medicine paper was about. | ||
| Alex is acting like it was about hydroxychloroquine, but it wasn't, and he would know that if he knew anything about this story. | ||
| The study that was retracted from the New England Journal of Medicine was based on data also provided by Surgisphere, but it was looking at the possible interaction between COVID-19 and blood pressure medications. | ||
| This is a major variable in this that Alex seems completely unaware of, which is troubling. | ||
| Anyone acting in a sincere capacity would never report on a story like this with such little knowledge about the topic, but Alex does this all the time. | ||
| He gets like two or three details and then just makes up the rest in a way that generally fits his propaganda angle, which is called lying. | ||
| A second major thing that Alex is making up in this story is how these retractions happened. | ||
| He's pretending that public pushback was responsible for getting the researchers to retract, but that's not at all what happened. | ||
| In reality, there were some questions that experts and news media brought up that called into question the particular dataset that was being provided by Surgisphere. | ||
| One of the major things that happened was, as you mentioned, The Guardian reported on May 28th that researchers in Australia reviewed the data in the Surgisphere set, which reflected 73 deaths from COVID-19 in the country at that point, when there was actually only 67 official deaths. | ||
| This set off alarms as to where exactly this data was coming from. | ||
| The Australian researchers contacted Lancet, who contacted the study's authors for clarification, who in turn requested Surgisphere authenticate their data. | ||
| To make matters more suspicious, Sapondasai, the head of Surgesphere, released a statement saying that, quote, a hospital from Asia had accidentally been included in the Australian data. | ||
| From there, you can't rely on this data unless it's audited. | ||
| And studies that relied on it have to be retracted, which is why those two were. | ||
| This had absolutely nothing to do with public backlash. | ||
| It had to do with Australian researchers attempting to conduct a study Science! | ||
| science. | ||
|
unidentified
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This honestly should give people a lot more confidence in the numbers that we're seeing because it's such a great example of scientific self-policing. | |
| People conducting this research pour over the data, and they're not the sort who just let discrepancies sit there and be like, oh, it's probably fine. | ||
| Hey, he's a good guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, he's a good guy. | ||
| Desai, what are you going to say? | ||
| No? | ||
| The third thing that Alex gets wrong here is him reporting that there is no underlying data. | ||
| That's not clear, really, and it's entirely possible that this was not an instance of an absence of data, but of poorly organized and regulated data, which renders it unreliable to be used for professional analyses. | ||
| That's not the same thing as having no data or it just being made up. | ||
| Let's consider the case of this Asian-Australian hospital that was found in the data. | ||
| That could well be a mistake that they made in terms of archiving the data, and possibly if you remove that hospital from Australia and put it into the Asian set of numbers, then the numbers might match official numbers. | ||
| That very well may be the case, but even if it is, you still have to retract because of the possibility of other unexamined problems being there in the data which could pop up later. | ||
| Okay, so you're saying that they're rigorously looking over their own data sets in order to refine their information and thus use it more effectively in the way that they're doing things? | ||
| I really think that sounds like a cover-up, Dan. | ||
| Probably a cover-up. | ||
| Okay, there we go. | ||
| As Dr. Alan Cheng, an epidemiologist and infectious disease doctor in Australia, told The Guardian, quote, if they got that wrong, what else could be wrong in terms of the Surgisphere data set? | ||
| A mistake like that taints a set of data, because it introduces far too much on reliability and uncertainty, so using it is essentially like trying to build a house on sand. | ||
| There are some indications that are coming out that point in the direction that Desai may have a history of fabrication. | ||
| As BuzzFeed reported on June 6th about some questions that reviewers are having about a paper he published in 2004 as part of his graduate studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. | ||
| That paper appears to have some instances of duplication in images used, which is a no-no. | ||
| A computer scientist they talked to said, quote, it's like the guy went crazy with Photoshop. | ||
| And went on to say, quote, I've never seen something like this. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| That being said, that alone is not proof that the data set that Surgisphere was using was fabricated or made up. | ||
| These indications of past malfeasance introduce that possibility, but it still needs to be proven, which I have not seen up until this point. | ||
| It might happen in the future, but for Alex to say that this data was made up is an indication that he doesn't understand the story that he's reporting. | ||
| He's kind of just winging it. | ||
| Well, you know who works in the Surgisphere, though, obviously. | ||
| It's Pauly Shore and the Lesser Baldwin. | ||
| Adam? | ||
| He's the Baldwin that's not a Baldwin. | ||
| Yeah, he was in DCCAM. | ||
|
unidentified
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Who was it? | |
| Is it Stephen Baldwin? | ||
| Is he the one in Biodome? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I don't know my Baldwins. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So the fourth problem is, again, Alex is saying that Bill Gates made up this data, which there's no indication of being the case. | ||
| If Alex wants to make this story about Bill Gates, he's going to need to substantiate that claim, which he has not done. | ||
| And given how poorly he seems to understand the basics of the story, I have no faith that he's ever going to. | ||
| The retracted study does not include Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation in the acknowledgments or the Declaration of Interest sectional. | ||
| I need a citation here. | ||
| If Alex wants me to take this seriously, it's not going to happen, so I'm not going to. | ||
| Alright, but... | ||
| Bill Gates helped create the popularity of Photoshop, which that guy used to trick people on his graduate studies. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Bill Gates' fault. | ||
| I would love for Alex to do that. | ||
| That would be a pretty amazing demonstration of how poorly he thinks. | ||
| So, this next clip, Alex talks a little bit more about this, and it led me to the realization that I need to have a little chat with you about... | ||
| A method of lying and a method of analysis that Alex does that I haven't been clear enough about in the past. | ||
| This is Bloomberg. | ||
| Researchers retract study linking malaria pill to heart risk. | ||
| The entire study, Lancet reports, is a complete and total hoax. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So the words hoax and Bill Gates appear nowhere in the Lancet article nor in the Business Insider article that Alex is claiming to report on. | ||
| He's just making that up because he doesn't care to understand the actual story and just wants to make things fit into his predetermined narrative. | ||
| This is important because Alex is directly asserting that Lancet is reporting that the study is a total hoax and was funded by Bill Gates. | ||
| That statement is a lie. | ||
| But I want to take this opportunity to discuss what Alex is actually doing here. | ||
| When I was in college, I was drawn toward the study of ancient things. | ||
| I dabbled in anthropology and religious studies before I landed on the possibly ill-advised path I ended up taking, where I have a degree with basically four minors instead of one major. | ||
| This is the cost of being indecisive. | ||
| You end up having to start a podcast about Alex Jones when you grow up, because you can't get hired anywhere else. | ||
| Yeah, there is that. | ||
| Not the best plan. | ||
| My advisor in college did not warn me of this. | ||
| At the time, I kind of thought, I'm going to be a famous stand-up, so who gives a shit? | ||
| Where's the whiskey? | ||
| I wasn't very smart. | ||
| I just imagine my high school guidance counselor using our story as a cautionary tale. | ||
| Do you want to start a podcast about a lunatic? | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Where people tell you not to get sugar gliders? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So in the course of my religious studies classes, I was introduced to the concepts of exegesis and eisegesis, which are two styles of textual criticism. | ||
| One who engages in exegesis attempts to understand the text that's in front of them and understand that text through a number of applied contexts. | ||
| Some work through the prism of understanding the text in terms of historical events happening around the time of the text's writing. | ||
| Another school of exegesis views the text itself as divinely inspired, and thus studies the text in the context that there's a meaning beyond what the original author intended, but it's still a study of the text. | ||
| There are a lot of different views on exegesis, but all of it is studying within a framework, and all of it relies on pulling things from the text to study. | ||
| The opposite of this practice is called eisegesis, which is something that serious scholars advise against strongly. | ||
| Someone who engages in eisegesis is someone who approaches a text for a reason, and they're seeking to find something that demonstrates a conclusion they already have. | ||
| In exegesis, you rely on things you take out of the text to inform your study, whereas in eisegesis, you're encountering the text with a point already in mind and are bringing that point to the text itself to defend your point. | ||
| It's a dangerous practice because it allows you to misuse primary sources and take small passages out of appropriate context to make whatever point you're inclined to make anyway. | ||
| But you're pretending that you're engaging with source material and that's what led you to your conclusion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a bastardized version of studying. | ||
| Are you sure they misuse? | ||
| Because what I hear is that one of those is exegesis and one of those is funogesis. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| It probably is way more fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I like believing what I believe and not worrying about what other people say. | ||
| I will say that in my life, things that are disciplined are typically less fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is why I have four minors instead of a major. | ||
|
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There you go. | |
| So exegesis and eisegesis are terms that are typically used in relation to biblical criticism, but the same methods apply to basically all sorts of textural analysis. | ||
| Alex is a person who engages in rampant eisegesis. | ||
| He has a point that he intends to make, and he picks various headlines that he thinks will reinforce his points as opposed to reading the news and forming conclusions based on the information that comes to him about reality. | ||
| A lot of conspiracy-minded people do this, since eisegesis is a practice that essentially is just a path to confirmation bias. | ||
| You go looking for something, and if you're lazy enough of a researcher, you'll probably find exactly what you're looking for, but there's a decent chance it won't be real. | ||
| That's what I'm seeing happen here with this news story that Alex is covering. | ||
| He's already decided that everything about COVID-19 is a hoax, so he's bringing that to his reading of this story when the actual text in no way supports his conclusions. | ||
| The only way he could arrive at that conclusion is for him to bring that conclusion to the text with him, which is inappropriate. | ||
| Alex does this all the time, and I generally just say he's lying or making things up, but I thought this was a particularly good example of his specific behavior, so I wanted to spend a little bit more time explaining this precise technique that he uses. | ||
| And when you understand this a little bit better, you can see it pop up in so many instances with Alex. | ||
| It's a very regular technique that if he'd actually learned things in his younger years about how to engage with different texts differently... | ||
| He probably wouldn't fall into, I don't even want to call it fall into, it's so intentional. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, eisegesis isn't necessarily bad. | ||
| Like, you can use it, that sort of thing, in terms of, like, engaging with poetry, or a lot of, even creative non-fiction type text. | ||
| They rely on the reader bringing something to the text to engage with. | ||
| It's the form that... | ||
| It is more appropriate for those genres. | ||
| But when you're talking about reporting, or you're talking about factual-based things, or primary sources and documents, it's just a wildly irresponsible thing to engage in. | ||
| Yeah, as somebody who's gone to five colleges and still doesn't even have a single degree, most of those were all in literature. | ||
| And that conversation in so many different classes about, like, Authorial intent versus... | ||
| There were always some people who were in any of those classes just like, I refuse to even bother picking up a history book about what was going on around this time. | ||
| What he was obviously writing about was whatever it is that I wished he was writing about. | ||
| And it happened every time. | ||
| Yeah, and to an extent, that can be a valid way to engage with poetry and fiction and those sorts of things. | ||
| But it's also a different path than... | ||
| Looking at a piece of even fiction within the context of when the author was writing it, what could things be allegories for based on the lived experience of the author? | ||
| It's a different approach to it. | ||
| And typically, especially when you're covering topics that are similar to the ones Alex is, eisegesis is just a completely inappropriate and flawed way to engage with. | ||
| You're going to end up lying intentionally. | ||
| You're going to end up lying unintentionally. | ||
| Everything is going to be disconnected from reality because every story is only going to really be a depiction of what you think and feel. | ||
| And that's pointless. | ||
| The thing I can only think of for when eisegesis isn't an attack on reality and a basis for propaganda is like Like the Tao of Pooh. | ||
| Did you ever read that? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Where the author just goes through and tries to explain Taoism and Zen Buddhism by using these characters and the way they interact. | ||
| But he's not saying that it was a clearly Buddhist series of books trying to explain something. | ||
| I'm not even sure if that is. | ||
| I think that's reimagining. | ||
| I think that might be more of an application thing. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| I don't know if that applies, but I'd have to think about it more. | ||
| Also, I haven't read The Dao of Pooh. | ||
| See, that's where... | ||
| I tend not to read books that everyone tells me to read. | ||
| I didn't tell you to read it! | ||
| No, but back then they did. | ||
| I know, I know, I know. | ||
| Back when it came out. | ||
| And the same thing with movies. | ||
| I've never seen Napoleon Dynamite or Little Miss Sunshine because they kept telling me to see them. | ||
| You're not missing anything. | ||
| And I resent it. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You can live without those movies, I promise you. | ||
| So Alex goes further into, you know, anti-vaccine and COVID-19 denialism and stuff, and he's just making stuff up. | ||
| The man they use as their poster boy for taking the new experimental vaccine almost died and was told by CNN and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation not to tell the public. | ||
| That's mainstream news breaking. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| People are still running around wearing the mask. | ||
| They're still buying into the hoax. | ||
| So this is about Ian Hayden. | ||
| We talked about him on the last episode. | ||
| He's a vaccine test subject who came forward to discuss his adverse reaction. | ||
| I've read a bunch of stories about this dude, and literally none of them back up what Alex is saying. | ||
| Here, Alex is presenting two claims. | ||
| First, that Ian was nearly killed by this vaccine. | ||
| And second, that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation told him not to come forward. | ||
| An article in the New York Post clearly says, quote, He also insisted that as sick as he was, it was never life-threatening, saying the effects that he had, they're over and I'm back to marathon running. | ||
| No outlet that interviewed him seems to be reporting that Ian almost died, unless you allow for a very, very broad reading of almost died. | ||
| For instance, that Post article discusses how his girlfriend was there to catch him when he fainted. | ||
| So you could make a disingenuous argument that if he'd fainted in the wrong place and she wasn't there, it could have been fatal. | ||
| But that's a stretch for the type of argument Alex is trying to make, and I don't accept it. | ||
| I'm not going to follow that one. | ||
| Again, this is eisegesis. | ||
| Alex wants the story to be that these vaccines are killing people, so he brings that to the story, and it completely alters the way he reports it. | ||
| He makes up details and embellishes things in order to match his narratives because it's not important to discuss reality. | ||
| It's crucial to warp reality to match the predetermined narrative. | ||
| As for the second claim, that Bill Gates told Ian not to come forward, I can find no evidence of this claim, and it's Alex's responsibility to prove it or admit that he made it up. | ||
| I checked out Ian's Twitter account, and he seems to be very supportive still of the vaccine that he was a part of the trial for. | ||
| At the end of May, he retweeted a Moderna announcement that they were entering Phase 2 trials. | ||
| It seems like he's mostly interested in coming forward to demystify the phenomenon of adverse reactions, which I think is pretty admirable. | ||
| Yeah, that is really cool. | ||
| Alex wants the story to be that Bill Gates is somehow threatened by Ian coming forward, because Alex thinks that all the media denies that medicines can sometimes have adverse reactions for the people who take them. | ||
| That premise is faulty, so naturally the conclusion you come to it with that premise is meaningless. | ||
| Well, what you're missing here is what actually happened, is he was standing out behind the semi-truck that had the boxes of the vaccine in it. | ||
| Somebody was carrying a dolly. | ||
| Knocked the boxes of vaccine on it, almost hit him in the head, so he almost got killed by the vaccine, and then Bill Gates was like, hey, don't tell anybody about this mix-up here. | ||
| And you know how that's proof? | ||
| Because he didn't tell anybody about that mix-up. | ||
| You know what I heard, actually? | ||
| I heard that Bill Gates mostly moves vaccines by way of pianos on strings. | ||
| Yeah, that'll happen. | ||
| Pianos being lofted on a... | ||
| So it could have been a situation where a piano that had a bunch of vaccines in it fell on him. | ||
| Similar thing. | ||
| He was keeping a bunch of vaccines in the apple carts and all that stuff as they walked by slowly. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| In reality, the Gates people and the scientists at Moderna probably have no problem with Ian coming out and telling his story because it gives people a better understanding of how clinical trials work. | ||
| Things get tweaked as trials progress. | ||
| You know, that's not threatening. | ||
| For instance, in the press release that Ian retweeted from Moderna, they discussed their initial dosing in Phase 2, and guess what? | ||
| They completely eliminated the top dose, which was 250 micrograms, from the trials because of the information they collected in Ian's round of tests. | ||
| Three people in the 250 microgram group had self-resolving adverse effects from the vaccine dose, which allowed the researchers to learn that this dose was probably too high. | ||
| So the new trials are focusing on a placebo, a 50 microgram dose, and a 100 microgram dose. | ||
| They learned from the first round that the difference between 100 and 250 micrograms wasn't relevant in terms of antibodies, but there were instances of mild side effects, which means there's no benefit and only risk to keeping that high-dose category. | ||
| People who engage with these sorts of things in terms of reality understand that this is a process. | ||
| I'm sure Ian wasn't happy that he got a bad fever and fainted, but I'm also sure that he's proud that he was able to help researchers gather essential information about how to proceed with creating a vaccine in a way that's safest for everyone. | ||
| And further, the researchers and Moderna and Bill Gates, they don't look at Ian telling his story as a huge negative. | ||
| They have to report on adverse events anyway, so those numbers were released prior to Ian coming forward. | ||
| All him coming forward does is it puts a human face on that number, and it's a human face who's pretty publicly saying that the side effect wasn't that bad, but ultimately, you know, it was bad, but not life-threatening, and that he's glad that he was a part of the study and he still believes in it. | ||
| I don't know how that's a negative for Bill Gates. | ||
| It's insane to me that this point of view that Alex is expressing is this hatred and distrust of a company trying to make a vaccine, and part of that trial is putting small groups together, getting the vaccine, and then getting that data in order to refine it and then pass it on to a larger group. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| Not somebody coming out and just saying, we've got the vaccine. | ||
| Everyone take it. | ||
| Without trying it, without testing it, without doing anything like that. | ||
| Just saying, hey, everybody, we got this one. | ||
| Inject this right into your ass. | ||
| And doing that thing where they wiggle their fingers while they announce it. | ||
| How is it that you trust the guy who's just like, eh, do this, over the people who are like, we're going to study this once and then again and then again. | ||
| And then people around the world are going to study it. | ||
| Because Alex doesn't live in reality. | ||
| He lives in this fictionalized version that he supports through misusing primary sources in order to provide a foundation and a basis that tricks people who don't pay attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Yeah, that's fucked. | |
| Yep. | ||
|
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So Alex moves on to his next big story. | |
| This one was actually pretty exciting. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| I missed this. | ||
| It broke two days ago. | ||
| The crew brought it to my attention last night. | ||
| It's a sickening 100-page report. | ||
| I read almost all of it. | ||
| There's a three-page synopses we'll go over. | ||
| But you talk about nightmare. | ||
| It's it. | ||
| This is coming up at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Now is the time for the Great Reset. | ||
| We kept saying COVID will be the excuse for the global depression with the UN-IMF World Bank taking control of the first world, just like they've done to the third world. | ||
| It'll be the excuse to finally push us under into debt bankruptcy to the world government. | ||
| They say exactly that. | ||
| But it's wonderful. | ||
| Lord Rothschild, and everybody will rule us now and loan us our own digital money back and dictate how we live. | ||
| And it says, your lifestyle's never going to be the same, but it's for the best. | ||
| And you'll have to get permission to travel, and it's officially from the Davos Group World Economic Forum, basically the spokesperson group for the Bilderberg Group. | ||
| Good to hear them come back up. | ||
| It feels like it's been forever. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| It's good to hear from them. | ||
| So I assure you that Alex is making up that stuff about reading this report. | ||
| But even if he wasn't, his strategy here is really interesting. | ||
| I strongly suspect that he's saying he read almost all of it because it's completely unbelievable that he read all of it. | ||
| So he's trying to make a slightly lesser claim in order to make it sound more plausible. | ||
| But here, I think that's a lie, even. | ||
| A man who claimed to be furious at four pages is not going to read it. | ||
| If he says he mostly read it, that still puts him at well over four pages. | ||
| So, Jordan, I'd like to lay out my reasons for why I think he's lying. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| One, I cannot find any 100-page report that Alex wants to be referring to. | ||
| Okay, alright. | ||
| The three-page synopsis appears to just be an op-ed on the World Economic Forum's website with the headline, quote, Now is the time for a great reset. | ||
| It's not a synopsis, it's just an op-ed about a larger idea. | ||
| Three, the article on Infowars covering this story just links to the World Economic Forum's op-ed and also uses the same graphic as the World Economic Forum's article. | ||
| But they don't provide attribution for it on Infowars. | ||
| You know, you don't need to worry too much about that. | ||
| On the World Economic Forum site, they credit the image to Unsplash, which is a copyright-free photo service. | ||
| So it's likely that Alex is in the clear legally, but that's only because of luck. | ||
| If that image was under copyright, he could get into trouble for stealing intellectual property without permission or attribution. | ||
| What an asshole. | ||
| He should be more careful. | ||
| What an idiot. | ||
| So Alex is making up the stuff he says about what's in the report. | ||
| That's not in the op-ed, which is mostly about how the world situation tends toward a very rare opportunity to reshape the world for the better. | ||
| This involves steering the market toward fairer outcomes, ensuring investments advance shared goals such as equality and sustainability, and harnessing innovations to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. | ||
| You can read into that whatever you like, and sure, it's probably sensible to be a little suspicious of the World Economic Forum, but what Alex is doing is taking this and writing his own story about it, which is disconnected from reality. | ||
| Again, he's engaging in eisegesis, which is a bad practice. | ||
| I like the World Economic Forum's place where they're saying all this stuff, but at the end of the day, their solution is probably like, and that's why private equity funds need to own all businesses. | ||
| And you're like, alright guys, let's hold on one second. | ||
| I didn't see that in this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is where it gets really interesting. | ||
| Like, the closest thing that I can come up to with this 100-page report is an interactive issues map on the World Economic Forum's website that was called The Great Reset. | ||
| That sounds fun. | ||
| I strongly suspect Alex didn't read this because to access it, you need a World Economic Forum membership, and I don't see him taking the time to sign up for one just to read something. | ||
| Proud subscriber since 2004. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I signed up for an account. | ||
| And it's actually really interesting the way this data and information is laid out. | ||
| This is an outrageously informative presentation on topics and a visualization about how these topics interact. | ||
| It starts with the Great Reset in the middle, and then it has a couple of nodes that go off of it, that branch out. | ||
| These nodes are things like shaping the economic recovery, strengthening regional development, or restoring the health of the environment. | ||
| If you click on one of these, let's use restoring the health of the environment as an example, it highlights all the issue on the outermost next set of nodes that relate to that topic. | ||
| So in this case, if you click on restoring the health of the environment, you have things like the ocean, forests, climate change, or plastics and the environment, and a whole bunch of others. | ||
| Of course, each of these nodes reflects the interplay with other nodes from the first level. | ||
| Like, the ocean involves the intersection of restoring the health of the environment node and the harnessing the fourth industrial revolution node. | ||
| Then, if you click on one of these issues, like the outermost issues, like the furthest out nodes, like, let's say, because we've already been using it, let's use the ocean as an example. | ||
| If you click on that, you're taken to a whole new wheel of nodes. | ||
| Now, the ocean is in the center of the visualization, with new nodes surrounding it. | ||
| Like overfishing, aquaculture, and human well-being, and the ocean. | ||
| In the original visualization with the Great Reset, there are 51 outermost nodes in that visualization. | ||
| And each of these, like the ocean, transfer to their own wheel of nodes of varying sizes. | ||
| What I'm saying is that there is way, way more than 100 pages of information on here. | ||
| But it's not laid out in any kind of way where you could... | ||
| It's even... | ||
| Plausible to be like, I read most of it. | ||
| It's almost like a visualization of the Club of Rome's problematique in that kind of sense. | ||
| In terms of that idea that things are interconnected, yes. | ||
| It does call to that idea of a way to approach problems. | ||
| And I think it is really interesting. | ||
| I'm not positive that there are a ton of prescribed things to do or things that should be done. | ||
| I'm sure there are. | ||
| Within that. | ||
| But it's largely just about these are topics that are really important. | ||
| Here's how they interact with each other. | ||
| And they're compiled by experts. | ||
| Each one of these is essentially a presentation that is farmed out to experts in the field. | ||
| I can't even pretend that I can accurately report on this visualization. | ||
| It's a presentation of presentations of presentations. | ||
| Yeah, there's so much there, and it pertains to so many different issues. | ||
| It would be impossible for me to cover it. | ||
| I spent a while going through it, and there's a lot of thought-provoking stuff to be found if you dig through it, but it's really outside the scope of the show for me to break it all down. | ||
| The point is that Alex didn't do any work on this. | ||
| He just saw an Infowars headline about this op-ed. | ||
| With a scary name on the World Economic Forum's website, and now he's making up a 100-page report that he's read almost all of. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| This is all bullshit. | ||
| You know, you can't see a certain sense of where a lot of people's heads are at, because you can go to that and you can realize the scope of the problem and really visualize everything that's going on and how the entire system itself is set up to destroy us. | ||
| Or... | ||
| You could tell a strong, crazy moron to kill your friends and your enemies. | ||
| Those are alternate strategies? | ||
| I just kind of think that one is easier than the other. | ||
| That's why Alex does the easy one. | ||
| It sounds right. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex talks about his own scholar, I suppose. | ||
| He cites an expert about something that is a load of bullshit. | ||
| If you look at the Google Trends, as our guest Hotep Jesus brought up yesterday, 2016, The Black Lives Matter Antifa blip was 20% of what it is now. | ||
| It is a massive off-the-chart spike. | ||
| So Alex hasn't looked into this Google Trends thing any deeper than just hearing Hotep Jesus say it and then he's repeating his version of things and just adding some stuff in for fun. | ||
| I already discussed the error that Hotep Jesus was making on our last episode, how he was erasing context from the trends numbers and writing his own story about it, so I'm not going to belabor the point again. | ||
| He was having his own fun of Jesus. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What's important to remember is that Alex is just adding in the stuff about Antifa. | ||
| If you go to Google Trends and you type in Antifa, you see no spike at all in 2016, because the right wing wasn't obsessed with Antifa at that point. | ||
| The first spike you see is on August 13th, 2017, and that's because it was right after the Unite the Right rally in Virginia, which happened on August 11th and 12th. | ||
| You remember? | ||
| That was the rally where a bunch of angry white dudes chanted, Jews will not replace us, and then a neo-Nazi ran over a protester in his car, and then Trump said there were good people on both sides. | ||
| You may recall that there was a concerted campaign in right-wing media to blame all the violence on Antifa, which is undoubtedly why there was a spike for interest in August 2017. | ||
| This is critical to understand. | ||
| Ultimately, the Google Trend information doesn't prove anything other than there was an increased interest in a certain topic at a certain time. | ||
| Interest in Black Lives Matter increased after the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castilla. | ||
| And the interest is really spiking right now, for clear reasons. | ||
| Similarly, the interest in Antifa increased after the Unite the Right rally, which makes sense. | ||
| People were curious about this thing that they hadn't heard of, and people keep talking about, so they googled it. | ||
| Alex is making up Google Trends information about Antifa in 2016, which wouldn't mean anything, even if it were true. | ||
| Now, just for fun, I decided to check the Google Trends information for the term emoluments. | ||
| Not surprisingly, there was a big spike on January 22nd, 2017, because that was right after Trump got inaugurated. | ||
| I wonder why people would be looking up emoluments immediately after a president who was in violation of that clause is, uh... | ||
| Strange. | ||
| Strange. | ||
| There was another big spike in late October 2019, but that was because Trump had been trying to host the G7 at one of his properties and had called the emoluments clause, quote, phony. | ||
| Neither of these spikes mean anything other than that the term was something that people were talking about at the time. | ||
| And if you take a moment to examine the context of what was happening around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep, that's stupid. | ||
| I'm still gonna go. | ||
| I'm mad that the right wing has not yet blamed the true instigators of the violence, and that is obviously the buttercream gang. | ||
| I can't see any other explanation for this. | ||
| Jordan, you have to shut up. | ||
| You're gonna get us killed. | ||
| I'm not gonna get us killed. | ||
| Look, I get it. | ||
| They're violent, but they're not everywhere. | ||
| Dan, they're not! | ||
| Holy shit, get down! | ||
| Ah, antsy. | ||
| Alright, that's the buttercream sketch. | ||
| Let's call Stephen Castillo over here. | ||
| Get over here, we got something for you. | ||
| Okay, so in his next clip, Alex tries to present the idea that these protests and this idea of a revolution that could be brewing is really all about killing cops. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| And I find a particular irony in Alex's words. | ||
| And look at these headlines. | ||
| Are we on the brink of revolution? | ||
| And they're telling us, the revolution's burning your local community and killing cops. | ||
| Oh, you're gonna have a lot more cops when they're done, boy, let me tell you. | ||
| So, I don't think that most people I've heard speaking want to kill cops, or really even endorse it. | ||
| They're advocating eliminating police departments or defunding them, but they generally stop short of expressing a desire to kill all cops. | ||
| Alex can play with that straw man all he wants, but it's not a real position that he's arguing against. | ||
| Interestingly, though... | ||
| In the past, we've heard Alex very clearly express that if people start to pass gun regulations that he doesn't approve of, the right-wing gun owners will go out and start killing cops. | ||
| He did say that they would do that, yes. | ||
| He's talked about it many times, and it's an offshoot of the extremist text Unintended Consequences, which was about right-wing extremists waging a war on the police because of gun laws. | ||
| We heard the topic slightly get broached when a caller brought up Unintended Consequences, and Alex replied that it was a good book. | ||
|
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I think regarding the Second Amendment, we could clarify a confusion of terms, intent, and reason if everybody would just go get a copy of Unintended Consequences and read it cover to cover. | |
| Yeah, it's an excellent book. | ||
| It's an excellent book. | ||
| So that was from Alex's show on January 16th, 2013. | ||
| And by February 10th, 2013, Alex was deep in covering the story of Chris Dorner, the LAPD cop who was going on a killing spree, seemingly primarily targeting police. | ||
| Alex was super upset that this shooting spree would lead to new gun regulations, and he expressed his concern in the form of a veiled threat that if police came to take guns, gun owners would rise up and kill them. | ||
| Let me tell you, you better hope the globalist civil war doesn't start. | ||
| You're scared to death that they've got patrol cops off the streets on motorcycles or foot because of one guy in Southern California, a state of 38 million people. | ||
| Twenty-something million of them in Southern California. | ||
| You start a fight with 160 million gun owners. | ||
| You let the global social engineers start this, the Bolshevik collectivists. | ||
| You let them get you into this while they sit back. | ||
| Do you have any idea what's going to happen if 1% of that one point, if 1% of that 160 million fight back and just go out and go after one person and then disappear and never seen again? | ||
| That's 1.6 million combatants. | ||
| Can you do the math? | ||
| That's as many police there are in this country. | ||
| By February 13th, Alex got way, way more explicit about this whole thing, directly saying that if cops tried to enact gun laws, literally all cops would be dead very quickly. | ||
| I mean, if you guys are hiding out because of Dorner, you start the gun confiscation. | ||
| I mean, I've done the math on it. | ||
| I know history. | ||
| I've studied it. | ||
| The cops will stand down is what's going to happen. | ||
| But if the cops tried to engage the American people, every cop in America would be killed, basically. | ||
| Very quickly. | ||
| I mean, because there's, again, 1% stands up of gun owners. | ||
| That's 1.6 million combatants. | ||
| Now you do the math. | ||
| You can see here how Alex's mind works. | ||
| He's creating a fake version of the current protests to sell to his audience to make them scared. | ||
| In this reality, these protesters want to kill police, but this is dumb because they're just going to end up with more police. | ||
| In the case of his pet issue, imaginary hypothetical gun laws, he's directly threatening the lives of literally all cops in the country with murder if they go along with gun regulations that aren't even real. | ||
| And this is smart and will not end up with more police. | ||
| This is a dreadful glimpse, because what it tells you is that Alex wishes state violence to be enacted upon people who are invested in protesting for a cause he's opposed to, in this case, greater equality in terms of justice. | ||
| However, when it comes to issues he feels impacted by, like gun regulations, he feels entitled to enact violence against the state to the point of murdering all cops if they act in a way that he finds contrary to how he wants them to. | ||
| This is an astoundingly authoritarian level of thinking, and I think it kind of provides some explanation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are massive shifts that have happened since Trump. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, like, he's always been... | |
| Fundamentally, I want everybody who disagrees with me to die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's just, he's... | ||
| You know, the term that got used so much, like right after Trump's election, that kind of became a joke, was emboldened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But legitimately, I think clearly what you see with Alex is not so much a total change, but an emboldening of a lot of these impulses and things that were there already. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And then it just underscores the fact that the hard right for all their bluster about wanting a second Civil War Blanket permission to kill whom they don't like. | ||
| They don't want a revolution. | ||
| They don't want to change the system. | ||
| The system is great for them. | ||
| The only thing that they don't like was that they can't kill people. | ||
| So in this next clip, Jordan, Alex, he has this big thing that he goes on. | ||
| I guess someone forwarded him a Facebook post or something from protest organizers who were explaining like... | ||
| Hey, if you're white and you come to these protests, please understand that follow the lead of the non-white rally-goers. | ||
| We start chants. | ||
| Hey, don't make this about you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Don't take selfies in order to... | ||
| Because, I mean, on one level, taking selfies is like turning this into some kind of a... | ||
| Tourism thing. | ||
| Right, there's that. | ||
| And then, secondarily, you run the risk of identifying people, like if you have other protesters, who could be put at risk by way of you... | ||
| You photographing them. | ||
| And we've seen cops track people down and fucking throw them up. | ||
| There are legitimate concerns that this post that Alex is making fun of express. | ||
| He has decided that what this is is black people turning whites into slaves. | ||
| That is a... | ||
| Man, that's a swing. | ||
| That's a swing. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
| We're going to cover this when we come back and how to stop the Globalist Master Plan and how it ties into Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Officially tells white people, no selfies. | ||
| You're here to serve us, reinventing slavery. | ||
| But before we go any further, ladies and gentlemen, please do not forget that we're running the biggest sale, not just of this year, but of last year. | ||
| Big old sale. | ||
| This is just tiresome. | ||
| This level of misrepresenting stuff, scaring people, and then just funneling that into an ad is just stupid. | ||
| Just awful. | ||
| So now, there's something that I haven't told you. | ||
| And it's because I was just bored by it, and I don't care. | ||
| For a couple days, Alex has been having a chessboard, a skull, and some roses on his desk. | ||
| And sort of pretending that it means something, but he hasn't really... | ||
| He hasn't mentioned it, really. | ||
| Well, he's mentioned it a little bit, but he hasn't really got into, like, what it's about. | ||
| So he's just got that there, his new set dressing, and we're all just supposed to look at it and be like, I guess this is fine. | ||
| Alex has had the skull on his desk before, and he's brought up that, like, his dad is a dentist and he has a skull. | ||
| And he found it. | ||
| So he wasn't going to do a last poor Yorick? | ||
| No. | ||
| He just had a skull because it's fun and he has one. | ||
| And now it's been taken to the next level with a chessboard and roses. | ||
| Sure, of course. | ||
| We're going full Shakespeare on this, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is... | |
| I love... | ||
| Jordan, I can't tell you enough how much I love this clip. | ||
| This clip is... | ||
| This is the kind of Alex that's so concentrated you might overdose if you don't have a tolerance built up. | ||
| But for me, since I'm somebody who's a junkie on this stuff, I can handle the hard shit. | ||
| This is you chasing the dragon. | ||
| Yeah, kind of. | ||
| I could sit over there with you and I could read you patents and documents and announcements by the IMF, announcements by the world government. | ||
| Or I could just look directly into the camera and talk directly into this microphone to radio listeners. | ||
| So real quick, please, mic down. | ||
| This is a little bit of a longer clip, but you've got to enjoy the ride. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And TV viewers, and ask you, do you want to control your own future? | ||
| Do you want a pro-human future? | ||
| Because when I say, do you want a pro-human future? | ||
| The establishment... | ||
| Has decided that you're worthless. | ||
| They've decided that you need to be gotten rid of. | ||
| And this isn't just rhetoric that I'm up here talking about. | ||
| It's the real world. | ||
| And it's real things that are happening and civilization and your family's future being undermined. | ||
| And so I sit up here on this TV program with this chest set, this skull, these flowers. | ||
| A lot of people have asked, Gotten emails, gotten text messages saying, what's the point on your show? | ||
| It looks really interesting. | ||
| Well, the point of it is that it's esoteric. | ||
| And it allows you, because it isn't a clear message, to project onto it what you're thinking. | ||
| But I can tell you what it means to me. | ||
| You have the potential of all God's gifts symbolized by a tree. | ||
| A tree of life and the red blood of humans that unifies us. | ||
| I'm going to get to that later. | ||
| I'm going to go to a special report here for a while. | ||
| I'm ready to do this show, I guess. | ||
| Oh my god, that's so perfect. | ||
| To me, that is the funniest fucking thing in the world. | ||
| It's distilled, Alex. | ||
| It's two minutes of like, oh my god, no one could do that but Alex. | ||
| So it starts. | ||
| See, it's esoteric. | ||
| I want to walk you through what's so great about this. | ||
| So it starts with Alex hand-waving away his responsibility to prove anything that he's talking about. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| Sure, I could prove it all, but instead I'm just going to look fake earnestly into the camera and I'm going to rattle off a bunch of vague platitudes about nothing. | ||
| A lot easier to do. | ||
| That is such a perfect encapsulation of Alex's style of proving things. | ||
| It runs through so much of his program. | ||
| How he'll say, you know, like, there's so much evidence of something that I can't get to any of it, so he doesn't get to any of it. | ||
| Why would you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's so many major news stories breaking, so I'm not going to cover any of them. | ||
| I'm paralyzed. | ||
| This is Alex's sleight of hand tactics in just clear view. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Then, Alex gets to the chess set in The Skull and the Rose. | ||
| This has been that set piece on his desk for the last few days. | ||
| He's acting real cagey about it. | ||
| Obviously, there's some kind of point he's trying to impart to the audience, but now he gets on air to explain it, and apparently it's abstract art. | ||
| It means whatever it means to you. | ||
| Alex instinctually knows that this is disappointing as hell, so he starts breaking down what it means to him. | ||
| Apparently the rose is a tree that symbolizes the sum of all God's gifts and red blood since it's a red rose, and then it all falls apart. | ||
| Yeah, he got lost. | ||
| He lost the thread after that one. | ||
| It very clearly sounded like he got distracted by his own bullshit and then was like, wait, what was the fucking chessboard about? | ||
| Alex clearly didn't think any of this through, so he just bails mid-thought and goes to a special report. | ||
| He wants so desperately to be deep and have some kind of symbolism reflected in these items, but he's also really stupid and he can't really fake it. | ||
| It's hilarious what an act he's putting on here. | ||
| Just everything is pretense and facade. | ||
| He acts like he can prove his claims on all of them, but instead, what's better is just looking at the camera and saying things. | ||
| He acts like he's some kind of a deep, esoteric message and these props on his desk, but he can't come up with a shit past calling a rose a treat. | ||
| It's like a treat. | ||
| He acts like he's fully committed to his show and all this, the info war, but when things aren't going well, he just leaves. | ||
| I'm gonna bounce. | ||
| This dude is legitimately the saddest person in media right now. | ||
| No competition. | ||
| Just pathetic. | ||
| He's like if a bookshelf filled with cardboard boxes bound to look like Britannica became a person. | ||
| Like, it is bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is empty. | ||
| But it's almost impressively bad. | ||
| Like, no one else could do... | ||
| It's a big bookshelf. | ||
| They would be fired so fucking fast if they were this incompetent. | ||
| Because he runs everything. | ||
| Just like, okay, fail, and then come back and fail tomorrow. | ||
| Never learn any lessons about how to present things. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I don't even like you telling me that there are lessons... | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| So Alex starts complaining about really rich people, and fair enough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I think that this discussion of Jeff Bezos and this little piece of his commentary on Bezos really reflects ultimately how bad Alex is, even with a layup. | ||
| Jeff Bezos. | ||
| He gives in charity each year 0.01%. | ||
| That's like the average person giving, I think it says here, $87. | ||
| So the point there is all good and well. | ||
| Bezos doesn't give a relevant chunk of his money to charity, but I don't care about Alex's take on that issue. | ||
| His solution is probably to get Bezos to give a billion to gun weirdos, and I don't care. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So what I'm most interested in that clip is the math. | ||
| If you take the ratio of Bezos' income and applied it to a normal person, it would be the equivalent of them giving $87 a year. | ||
| Alex has claimed that it's.01% of Bezos' income, right? | ||
| So that's the same as $87 to you or me. | ||
| I have some news for Alex. | ||
| For $87 to be.01% of your income, you have to be making $870,000 a year, which I think is a little bit above the average income. | ||
| The average income, Dan. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| According to Investopedia, the median income in the United States for households in 2018 was $63,179. | ||
| I have no idea what Alex thinks people are making, but it's clearly not something he's thought about at all. | ||
| I heard him throw out those numbers, and even without doing the math, I knew this was a load of shit, but I didn't realize how far off he was. | ||
| What's going on here is that Alex misread the headline in Vox that he's trying to cover, which said that Bezos gave 0.1% of his wealth to charity in 2018. | ||
| But, in the headline, this is visualized as 0.1, so Alex just moved the decimal point. | ||
| He didn't realize how big of a difference moving that decimal point is. | ||
| It's a transposition error. | ||
| These are the issues and inaccuracies that come from sloppy and lazy reporting. | ||
| You could say that it doesn't matter, that the point that Bezos doesn't give enough to charity is right, and I would disagree with you, even though I do agree with the point. | ||
| This is a serious issue, like Bezos' charity. | ||
| The reality of this man's wealth and his non-giving needs to be discussed in terms of reality by people who care, who aren't just using headlines they don't understand and actually have misread to score dumb points about nonsense. | ||
| Alex isn't capable of the kind of discussions that are needed to help solve the problems in society that billionaires or hypothetical trillionaires create, so allowing him to pretend like he's a part of it is just Kind of counterproductive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you can see that. | ||
| He doesn't understand the basics of the topic because he skimmed a headline. | ||
| He's like, oh, fuck, 0.01%. | ||
| It is a small problem, but it implies a large problem. | ||
| Well, what it is, is the exact... | ||
| If he were to go to a protest at Jeff Bezos' house about this situation, he would not sit and listen to the fucking organizers. | ||
| He would stand up and say some bullshit, and he would distract from everybody else trying to do the right thing. | ||
| He's a dick. | ||
| There's a very famous video that... | ||
| It's a long, old video of a gun protest in Austin that Alex came out to with his bullhorn and the organizers of that protest were trying to get him to come speak up on the dais and he wouldn't do it. | ||
| He was just distracting from the actual protest to the point where they theorized that he was intentionally disrupting their protest. | ||
| And it probably wasn't that. | ||
| It's probably just... | ||
| Yeah, I would go with that. | ||
| But it is that kind of behavior. | ||
| Yeah, if Alex went to protest, he takes them over. | ||
| He has to co-opt everything. | ||
| And he doesn't take them over or co-opt them. | ||
| He just makes them shit and makes everybody hate him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Alex, in this next clip, this is another one that's really fascinating to me. | ||
| The one where he's talking about the chess set and the esoteric imagery. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| In the same way, there's something going on in this clip that is largely more important than anything he's talking about. | ||
| And I'll discuss it after you listen to it. | ||
| Here's the biggest thing I've said in months, and I just want this to go across to all of you for myself, for you, for your family, wherever you are in the world, wherever you are listening to us right now. | ||
| People are still wearing masks all over the world. | ||
| Many businesses and companies. | ||
| You guys got a mic open or you got an audio feed feeding into me. | ||
| I thought it'd go away after a while, but it's not. | ||
| So let me just get back to what I was saying. | ||
| I'm mad at the crew. | ||
| I'm really stressed out about all this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I've seen comments online. | |
| Oh, Jones, when he does this thing, like, oh, I don't know if I can do the show now. | ||
| It's for theatric purposes, or it's just to build up suspense. | ||
| No, it's not! | ||
| But I appreciate it. | ||
| They're putting in permanent medical martial law with a psychotic person that ran Jeffrey Epstein's operation. | ||
| That's what Bill Gates did. | ||
| He ran Jeffrey Epstein's operation to compromise scientists across the board with blackmail. | ||
| For sex with underage women and children and snuff films so they could scientifically take over and have a fake scientific consensus ahead of pushing giant frauds like this. | ||
| So that clip is super interesting. | ||
| You can tell from Alex's tone and the language he was using, he was preparing to go out to break with a plug, or more likely begging his audience to spread his materials around so he can sucker in new customers. | ||
| It's a very distinctive way that he ramps into that stuff, and this is like two minutes before the end of the hour, so that's usually when he's most likely to plug. | ||
| You can kind of tell by the tone of his voice at the beginning of the clip. | ||
| Then he gets distracted by tech problems and completely loses his train of thought, and he blows up about how he's not doing any of this for theatrics. | ||
| When he realizes that he's kind of being theatrical about accusations that he's being theatrical, he knows he has to give some kind of an explanation for why he's on edge, and you see what he comes up with. | ||
| It's that Bill Gates was running Jeffrey Epstein's entire operation. | ||
| That doesn't sound true. | ||
| Now, here's what's fascinating about this. | ||
| You can actually hear Alex decide to run with the narrative. | ||
| I'll play you just the little section where you can hear his footing shake slightly and then you can hear him reassure himself. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| They're putting in permanent medical martial law with a psychotic person that ran Jeffrey Epstein's operation. | ||
| That's what Bill Gates did. | ||
| He ran Jeffrey Epstein's operation. | ||
| You can hear it in the tone. | ||
| He says that Bill Gates ran Epstein's operation, and then, as if he's trying to quiet a doubting voice in his head, he follows it up with, that's what he did. | ||
| It's amazing to me, since it's not very often you can hear Alex pimping himself into more extreme narratives in real time. | ||
| He's been very clear that Gates and Epstein knew each other and there was a connection between the two in the past, and that's all good and well, but this is a massive departure from that beaten path. | ||
| This is honestly possibly the kind of slander you might even get in trouble with with a public figure. | ||
| I would like Bill Gates to do something about this. | ||
| Alex is directly asserting on his show that Bill Gates was running Jeffrey Epstein's operation and was involved in abusing children and making snuff films. | ||
| Obviously, it's not worth Gates' time to get into the mud with Alex, but that... | ||
| I'm almost certain that it was Alex thinking, can I get away with this? | ||
| And then deciding that he can. | ||
| I'm not sure that this is the best place for someone to step in and eat Alex's lunch, but the point that no one has financially destroyed him up to this point, because he makes shit up about them, that's what has gotten us to this point. | ||
| Just knows that there's no consequences for anything he says. | ||
| Without any evidence, he can accuse Bill Gates of being involved in murders and he knows that there's no consequences. | ||
| It's honestly pretty remarkable. | ||
| Alex is basically a living example of how these sorts of laws only apply when someone is willing to enforce them. | ||
| And if you spend all your time slandering people who are too busy to sue you or who wouldn't dignify your comments with their time or attention, you're pretty much free to say whatever you want about them. | ||
| So let this be a lesson to future propagandists. | ||
| If you want to make materially false and defamatory claims about someone, always go for top-tier targets. | ||
| As Alex has shown, the only time you get in trouble is when you go after private persons like Sandy Hook families or mid-tier folks like the owner of Chobani. | ||
| The actual elite are too busy, so you can just defame them all you want, and generally there will be no consequences. | ||
| Isn't there some kind? | ||
| He can delegate, you know? | ||
| Bill Gates, I get maybe he's busy. | ||
| Maybe he's busy. | ||
| What do I give a fuck? | ||
| But come on, just send a guy. | ||
| Hire a junior lawyer who's never worked before. | ||
| Somebody straight out of law school. | ||
| Slam dunk case. | ||
| Give them their first win right out the gate. | ||
| 50 grand a year, you'll get it. | ||
| But possibly, you know, you end up... | ||
| As we've seen with so many of these cases that Alex is involved in, you end up in a situation where he just does these stalling tactics in order to try and create more attention for himself. | ||
| You end up with the possibility of just getting bogged down in something that plays into his hands, even if you would end up winning the case. | ||
| Hey, you got a junior lawyer. | ||
| Tell him not to give up. | ||
| Keep on going. | ||
| Don't even talk to him. | ||
| Don't even acknowledge that there is a lawsuit going on. | ||
| Just let this dude do his work. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| My position on it is more that that should have happened long ago. | ||
| Oh, a million years ago. | ||
| At this point, it's probably past the point where anyone would see an upside in engaging that way. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Should have happened long ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, one of the things that I found pretty surprising last week is that Alex was very slow to pick up on the new Project Veritas video, but he finally does here on June 5th, and he plays a little bit of it, and Alex is dumb. | ||
| The Project Veritas knocked it out of the park again with an undercover inside Antifa for several years. | ||
| When you hear just the sliminess and evil of these Soros human-funded turd baskets, it just makes you sick. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| So this video is complete shit, and it's almost certainly a total fraud. | ||
| In the video, James O 'Keefe, felon and proven repeated liar, claims to interview someone who was deep inside Antifa. | ||
| Of course, this person is completely anonymous and has their face obscured, so honestly, they could just be making everything up. | ||
| They probably are. | ||
| There are some serious inconsistencies that come up in the video, which are pretty well laid out in a piece in the Daily Beast. | ||
| The biggest one is the guy in the video who claims to be embedded with Antifa says that they hold required lectures at a bookstore in Portland called In Other Words before the bookstore opens for business. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a problem because according to Oregon Live, In Other Words closed in 2020. | |
| Okay, well, there's that. | ||
| What this indicates is that they chose this bookstore for a reason, and it's pretty easy to guess what that reason is. | ||
| In other words, was the inspiration for the fictional bookstore Women and Women First in the show Portlandia. | ||
| If you were a right-wing propagandist hack and you were trying to come up with a location for this militant SJW army to meet in Portland, it makes sense that the first thing you would come to mind would be the one bookstore you've heard of in that city. | ||
| But you have to do your homework, because when you don't, you end up putting out transparently fake shit like this and it raises questions. | ||
| There's undercover footage in that video that's alleged to be from one of these secret Antifa meetings in Ed Other Words, but that's not really possible since they've been out of business for over two years. | ||
| That introduces a really troubling possibility that the whole section of video was staged. | ||
| It's not like this footage is supposed to be from 2017 or something. | ||
| It's presented as current. | ||
| This would be completely laughable and discrediting under normal circumstances, but what O 'Keefe is doing has a strong potential to lead to violence against left-leaning protesters. | ||
| Who easily tricked viewers, we'll assume, are Antifa and thus domestic terrorists. | ||
| This is one of the reasons why people like James O 'Keefe have to be shut down. | ||
| If he was doing sincere investigative journalism, like into the potential political malfeasance of democratic politicians and reporting on stories that were real but inconvenient to the left, then I would absolutely defend entirely his right to continue doing that work. | ||
| His career is just too full of complete frauds being passed off as reporting, and ultimately you can see that he doesn't care if what he puts out puts people in danger. | ||
| His misinformation isn't intellectual or abstract. | ||
| He's lying in a way that can directly lead to people getting hurt, and that cannot be allowed to continue. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like... | ||
| Like, he needs to be sued. | ||
| If anybody gets sued, inspired, or if anybody gets hurt, inspired by that, or something, I don't know what the mechanism would be, but like this... | ||
| This is unacceptable. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like after World War II, one of our laws should have just been like, if you're doing Goebbels shit, no. | ||
| Like, real simple, just like, hey, Goebbels did this, this, and this. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| If you do, it's against the law. | ||
| The end. | ||
| I don't understand how that's hard. | ||
| That one seems pretty easy, and this is... | ||
| Clear and transparent bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, it's troubling. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| And nobody cares, because there's other shit going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| So, in this next clip, we see Alex taking George Floyd's death and trying to use it for his own political purposes. | ||
| It's really interesting the way he's taking that and using it to reinforce a narrative that he already had, which is not good. | ||
| But there are hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States every year from pneumonia and other things combined. | ||
| So there were some deaths, but most of them were gunshot wounds and other things. | ||
| They attributed it to that. | ||
| People that died in car wrecks, all of it, are added to the COVID-19 death list. | ||
| George Floyd's been added to it. | ||
| When he obviously died of a mixture of fentanyl and asphyxiation. | ||
| So, it is true that George Floyd tested positive for coronavirus back in April, and the positive test result was confirmed in his autopsy, but I can find no evidence that his death has been added to the COVID-19 death counts. | ||
| The reports I can find on this say that doctors don't believe that the coronavirus played any role in his death, and what Alex is doing is just assuming that because he tested positive, he was listed then as a COVID death. | ||
| That's handled differently by different states, so it's unclear to me if that's true, but Alex is making the assumption and reporting it as fact, which is sloppy, and now he must substantiate this, which he hasn't. | ||
| If Alex or any of his interns would have looked into this at all, they would have found that the state of Minnesota released specific guidance in terms of reporting COVID-19 deaths back in April. | ||
| If they'd looked into this and read it, they might have a better understanding of how these things are reported. | ||
| The reporting form in Minnesota has multiple sections. | ||
| The first most important section is about the underlying cause of death. | ||
| This is part one, and it's set up as a sequence of causality. | ||
| In one example they give, the cause of death could be reported as acute respiratory distress symptom due to pneumonia due to COVID-19. | ||
| There is a descending causality tree where the immediate cause of death is linked to the underlying thing that brought about that condition. | ||
| Then there's a second section, Part 2, where the death certifier can, quote, enter other significant conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause given in Part 1. It's possible that Floyd could have COVID-19 listed there, but it seems unlikely since all the reports I can find about this indicate that the condition played no role in his death. | ||
| There's another consideration to keep in mind, and that is from the Minnesota guidance document. | ||
| Quote, The manner of death, sometimes referred to as circumstances of death, is also reported on death certificates. | ||
| In the case of death due to COVID-19 infection, the manner of death will almost always be natural. | ||
| One of the other classifications of manner of death is homicide, which Floyd's death has been consistently deemed to be. | ||
| A classification of homicide would almost by definition preclude the death for being counted as a COVID-19 death. | ||
| In order for a COVID-19 death to be homicide, you'd have to probably... | ||
| Show a case where someone was intentionally infecting people, and that's not this. | ||
| The point here is that it's incredibly unlikely that George Floyd's death is being counted in the COVID-19 statistics, but that is a claim that Alex is asserting as fact. | ||
| He needs to back that up, and he absolutely can't do it, which means he's making this shit up. | ||
| He's lying. | ||
| Yeah, no, anything. | ||
| I'm done with distractions about Floyd's... | ||
| No, I don't care. | ||
| I don't care what angle you've got on him. | ||
| We can't get distracted by his bullshit. | ||
| I totally understand that, and I'm with you. | ||
| Unfortunately, our show is mostly about discussing these distractions. | ||
| I understand! | ||
| It's a paradox. | ||
| It is unfortunately frustrating because of the nature of the thing we've decided to do. | ||
| No! | ||
| Let's just... | ||
| I don't think the podcast where I just scream I don't care is going to take off. | ||
| Hey man, there have been a lot of times when I've had to just say I don't give a shit. | ||
| So you're entitled to that as well. | ||
| And I think that that's an important voice and a point to make is that a lot of this stuff is distractionary that's meant to take focus and attention away from these protests that are growing and massive and important. | ||
| And it's the same thing with the tactic of so many media places, just focusing on a looting incident as opposed to. | ||
| the tens of thousands of people gathered to chant and hear a speaker or make a point known to the people in power. | ||
| It is a distractionary thing, and it's always important to remember what the center focus is and not allow your eyes to be taken off that. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because otherwise, you lose focus, you lose the... | |
| The point. | ||
| And we're talking about a guy whose entire job is to take eyes off of it. | ||
| So it is unfortunate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But we don't, you know, I mean, it is still important to bring that up. | ||
| So I'm glad you did. | ||
| Although, at the same time, Alex is what he is. | ||
| We are who we are. | ||
| So Alex gets into this next clip. | ||
| He talks about a Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Man. | ||
| What's he doing talking about Australia? | ||
| Bad stuff. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| This is the official Black Lives Matter of Melbourne. | ||
| Again, they bring in populations from outside the area, teach the populations to hate each other, and then say police, even though most of them are minority in Melbourne, aren't even allowed to carry out their job or they're racist. | ||
| So you make the invading force the victim. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| So, first things first, Alex is describing black people as an invading force in Melbourne, whereas the white folks are the rightful inhabitants, which is wild. | ||
| Well, they were born there, Dan. | ||
| Someone should tell them about what happened to the Aborigines and Maori. | ||
| No, they don't have racism in Australia because it's all white. | ||
| There is literally no other way to hear those comments than as a blatant example of white nationalism. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Then, Alex says that Melbourne's police department is mostly minorities. | ||
| I have no idea where he's getting that information from, and I strongly suspect he's making it up. | ||
| I was able to find a 2008 analysis of the Victoria Police Force, of which Melbourne is a part, and it does not show a lot. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| force. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has an over-representation of English-speaking countries and an alarming under-representation of non-English-speaking minorities. | |
| In 2006, there were 9,037 Australian-born officers in the Victoria Police, compared to 6 from Northern African countries, 25 from South African countries, and 17 from Southwest Asian ones. | ||
| This is in contrast to 698 from other English-speaking countries, predominantly from the UK. | ||
| These numbers are low, even when you look in terms of proportions of the population. | ||
| It's still underrepresentation to a staggering degree. | ||
| Oh boy, it's almost like fascists love being cops. | ||
| I was able to find another analysis from 1979 which showed that, quote, if we add the Australian and British categories together, we find that all forces are between 94 and 98% Anglo-Saxon. | ||
| So Alex might be a little. | ||
| That's too much. | ||
| But again, that's from 1979. | ||
| So there is some progress that's been made since then. | ||
| But if you look at the 2008 analysis, it's still showing the same... | ||
| Kind of underrepresentation that was marked upon in the 1979 analysis, which leads you to believe that it's probably unlikely that since 2008 it's become majority-minority. | ||
| It seems ludicrous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, that's also one of the reasons that we got here where we are, is like, sure, you know, the incremental approach isn't cutting it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it hasn't cut it, and it's not going to cut it. | ||
| If in 40, 50 years or whatever it is, or 41 years, we're still at 85%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, that's not good. | ||
| Incremental shit probably is not the best way to approach things. | ||
| And also, incremental things that are solving the wrong problems aren't necessarily... | ||
| So, I can find no evidence that the police in Melbourne are mostly minorities, so I'm just going to need Alex to substantiate that, or else I'm going to assume he's making it up. | ||
| Also, it doesn't really matter. | ||
| Dolores Jones Brown, the founder of the Center on Race, Crime, and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is quoted by the Police Accountability Project as saying, There's a bit of naivete that if you have an officer of color, that officer can't engage in racial profiling. | ||
| And I think all the evidence suggests that it is not the case. | ||
| Jones-Brown goes on to express that the racial bias that's seen in police is primarily likely a result of the culture of police departments as opposed to the individual identities of officers. | ||
| The Police Accountability Project also cited a 2004 National Research Council study which said, There is no credible evidence that officers of different racial or ethnic backgrounds perform differently during interactions with citizens simply because of race or ethnicity. | ||
| If you're going to have a police department, it's good to have them not all be from one demographic group. | ||
| But if you think the simple act of increasing representative diversity is going to solve the underlying problems of police-civilian interactions, you're very naive. | ||
| And it's not the... | ||
| Primary problem to be solved here. | ||
| I mean, the police are trained now as a military force. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, when you send an army into wherever, the soldiers, just because they're different from different backgrounds doesn't mean they're not all trained to be soldiers who take orders and do that same shit. | ||
| It's the fact that they're essentially an invading force. | ||
| The cops, you know? | ||
| It is the bottom line of Solving the wrong problem. | ||
| Though, good, you shouldn't have complete uniformity of background in any circumstance. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I don't want all librarians to be one ethnicity or age group or gender. | ||
| I don't think that's good, let alone the police. | ||
| What if the only people who are allowed to be librarians were Polynesians? | ||
| Wouldn't that be a weird thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That'd be like a Pokemon world where everybody's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So in this next clip we learn... | ||
| This is kind of interesting because what I see is Alex trying to shift the Black Lives Matter and societal unrest type narratives into being applicable to Bill Gates. | ||
| Which I think is interesting because it doesn't fit. | ||
| It doesn't work for the way Alex categorizes his villains. | ||
| But he's trying and I think it's a stupid thing to do. | ||
| And now the mission of Black Lives Matter is Planned Parenthood. | ||
| Abort the black babies, break up the black families, and abort your babies, and break your ass up, too. | ||
| It's pure evil. | ||
| They're running a pirate flag on us. | ||
| They're run by a lying criminal named Bill Gates. | ||
| All right, I'm going to your calls. | ||
| I just want to say this. | ||
| I've been so busy with the riots and the insanity and all the attacks and everything that's going on that we've not ended the big mega-sale we had. | ||
| So busy. | ||
| I just expanded it and just said, you know what, gut level, I just think we should sell out basically of all our best sellers. | ||
| Strike while the iron's hot. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, so I think this is just an attempt to sideline Soros, but with Soros narratives. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| It's convoluted. | ||
| I don't think it works very well. | ||
| I don't think his audience is going to be able to follow the threads, but good luck. | ||
| Now, all I heard in my head was just a voice, in Alex's voice, just going, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. | ||
| I hate you. | ||
| I know this feels good, but it's not going to work. | ||
| Not going to work. | ||
| Not profitable. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| So, Alex, at the beginning of this episode, was bragging about how he was going to take calls. | ||
| He was going to take so many calls. | ||
| It takes him for fucking ever to get to calls. | ||
| I think it takes maybe five total, something in that ballpark. | ||
| His first caller is from Northern Ireland, and this guy, boy, not good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I'd like to say is it's not possible for the likes of Donald Trump to get together the best team of editors and researchers, put together a six- to eight-hour video, do a fireside chat explaining all the crap that these people have been doing for the past few years, And then if it is true that Obama signed an executive order under certain situations that he could take over businesses, then why doesn't then Donald take over CNN and MSN and then put that video on there and play it on a loop? | |
| That's right. | ||
| Trump could do a couple-hour fireside chat where he presents all the hoaxes they've run, all the lies, expose Soros, expose Antifa, and they would all be done. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| And I know Trump more and more is moving towards doing that. | ||
| Notice how Fox News wasn't included in his list because they don't need to be taken out. | ||
| They're already, yeah. | ||
| I think I know which side of the troubles he was on. | ||
| This would be a gigantic breach of the First Amendment. | ||
| But Alex doesn't care. | ||
| He supports his ruler king using the force of the state to make media companies broadcast his own propaganda and content. | ||
| That is far, far worse than Twitter banning someone because it's the actual government forcing speech. | ||
| Alex doesn't care about his pretend love of the Constitution. | ||
| It's always just been a costume that he wears to make his extreme right-wing militia murder fantasies appear to be based in some... | ||
| Yeah, he must have watched that iconic Apple ad and been like, why did you throw the hammer into the TV? | ||
| The nice man was talking. | ||
| He was telling us all how to feel. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting swing for him to take, and that is like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want government-controlled media. | |
| Trump's the First Amendment. | ||
| What? | ||
| Because of this Northern Irish British nationalist, I want Trump to take over the media. | ||
| Yeah, so this guy from Northern Ireland has another little thought that is very dumb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's scary times. | |
| It's end times. | ||
| I don't know what it is it's going on. | ||
| I sometimes maybe think Donald's a part of it because if you look at the Illuminati card game, his face is in it. | ||
| And I keep seeing people say enough is enough. | ||
| And if you look at that card, it seems to be his face with the card is enough is enough. | ||
| I would love for you to check into that. | ||
| And then I watch your show every day religiously. | ||
| And then I'd like an update on that if it was at all possible. | ||
| An update on what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Illuminati card game. | |
| Oh yeah, let's fucking do that. | ||
| Let's have an update on that. | ||
| So this is incredibly weak. | ||
| We've already talked a ton about the Illuminati card game and how if these dum-dums want to pretend that these cards are real, they have to accept a whole lot of other stuff like Godzilla and vampires. | ||
| There is a card in the deck that's titled Enough is Enough, which depicts a guy yelling. | ||
| But there's no indication that it's Trump, and honestly, it doesn't even really look like him. | ||
| The effect of the card is to clear out all zap paralysis or freeze effects that have been played against you, but you can't move your plot forward in that turn. | ||
| The angry yelling person on the card is basically depicting someone who's had enough of these zap paralysis or freeze effects so forgoes a turn because enough is enough. | ||
| It's a ridiculous stretch to pretend that this is Trump or that there's any kind of hidden meaning in here. | ||
| I was perusing these blogs that make these arguments. | ||
| And the same people who speculate about this also claim that the jogger card, that was a prediction of the Boston bombing. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| They also claim that the oil spill card predicted the Deepwater Horizon spill. | ||
| That sounds true. | ||
| But this completely ignores that the Exxon Valdez spill happened prior to the game's release, and there was every indication that such a disaster could happen again if people weren't careful, which they were being. | ||
| Didn't we see? | ||
| We saw that it never happened again! | ||
| Everybody saw after the Exxon Valdez, all of the people in power took the necessary steps to make sure that this never occurred again. | ||
| So stupid. | ||
| And then they put it into a card game to prove it to us. | ||
| I will say that of the conspiracies that are floated, particularly by Alex's collars and Alex himself, the Illuminati card game-based ones are like, I wish you'd just do that. | ||
| That could, like, I mean, it's frustrating and boring, but at the same time, it's like, all right, let's do this. | ||
| You want a time travel? | ||
| Alex, I fucking wish I'd cut out this clip. | ||
| Alex starts talking about Steve Jackson Games. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Who made that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, man, there's a lot of stuff on there. | ||
| Like, there's one card that looks like me. | ||
| There's one that looks like Ron Paul. | ||
| And I think about it, and I'm like, did this guy have a time machine? | ||
| Fucking do that, Alex. | ||
| Get into it. | ||
| Prove that Steve Jackson has a time machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do it! | |
| Like a sermon. | ||
| The pastor takes out a single verse to talk to... | ||
| He just pulls out one card for each show, and he's just like, and here's how I'm going to prove exactly what this is. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Like Steve Jackson. | ||
| Angels feather. | ||
| Angels are up there. | ||
| Angels be flying around anyways. | ||
| Do the frog god. | ||
| Frog god. | ||
| Yeah, I would love it if Alex just turned Steve Jackson into some kind of man. | ||
| I think that'd be great. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Anyway, Alex gets to talking about some other news stories about the National Guard being not welcome in D.C. hotels and shit. | ||
| Utah National Guard troops deployed to D.C., evicted from hotel, Senator Mike Lee says. | ||
| He discovered 200 that were thrown out last night. | ||
| Now he says it's 1,200 confirmed. | ||
| They literally say, we don't want your kind here. | ||
| So the virtue signaling by corporations are, we don't want police, we don't want military around. | ||
| Legos pulled all of its toys that have police in them. | ||
| And now the left says, that's not enough. | ||
| We want fire department ones pulled. | ||
| We want all, and they're like, yes, we'll pull those too. | ||
| Now the fire department's evil. | ||
| So Alex is just repeating inaccurate stories that trace back to propaganda campaigns pushed by Trump's social media guy, Brad Parscale. | ||
| And other dum-dums like Deanna Lorraine. | ||
| The idea they were putting out was that Lego was removing all these sets that involved cops from shelves, which isn't true. | ||
| Lego had sent out an email that right-wing liars were misrepresenting, which led to Lego releasing a second statement to clarify, saying, quote, We did not pull our product from shelves. | ||
| Rather, paused digital marketing activity as a well-intended gesture to show sensitivity for the tragic events in the United States. | ||
| Generations of children have loved playing with the sets in our LEGO City line that is a constant in our collection. | ||
| Given the tragic events in the United States over the past ten days, we paused digital marketing of sets that could be perceived as insensitive if promoted at this time. | ||
| Statement from LEGO. | ||
| We read the room. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This was an instance of a company correctly recognized that now is not the time for ads that involve Lego cops. | ||
| It could come off as a little gauche. | ||
| They requested affiliates pull any links. | ||
| They had advertising those products and halted ad campaigns for said products, but you can still buy them at the store. | ||
| Alex would probably still call this virtue signaling, but it's pretty telling that he doesn't even know what the actual story is. | ||
| He only knows the fake outrage bait version that he's picked up from fellow right-wing bullshit artists. | ||
| And when he says that the left is mad that they're not virtue signaling enough, I went and I found that Infowars story. | ||
| It's just like a list of random tweets. | ||
| A list of random tweets? | ||
| You got us. | ||
| You got the left. | ||
| You got a few tweets. | ||
| I didn't recognize any of the accounts. | ||
| I have no idea what's going on. | ||
| Like, if that's the level of game you want to play... | ||
| Leftists. | ||
| Everything is meaningless. | ||
| Leftists online. | ||
| Twitter tweets. | ||
| Any tweet you get that sounds like it might fit your narrative. | ||
| Grow the fuck up if you're so triggered by people having a position on Twitter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Everybody wants a safe space but me! | ||
| I bet if I went through that, I would find accounts with like a hundred followers. | ||
| I bet that's the... | ||
| I should have done that. | ||
| It takes scouring to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's a pointless exercise. | ||
| What you end up with is nothing. | ||
| So as for the Utah National Guard thing, this is being wildly blown out of proportion. | ||
| D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser requested that Trump remove federal and military troops who had been sent to the city because they were only making things worse and absolutely not going to lead to a de-escalation. | ||
| She was clear that troops could stay in the D.C. hotels until Trump removes them, but that D.C. will not pay for them to be housed. | ||
| This led to them being relocated from one hotel to another. | ||
| U.S. Army Master Sergeant W. Michael Hoke told KSL-TV, quote, Some National Guard responders were quartering in hotel accommodations, which had pre-existing contractual agreements with the district. | ||
| Out of respect for existing agreements, those facilities have, with the city government, those service members have relocated. | ||
| What this ultimately comes down to is that D.C. already had contracts with these hotels for National Guard members who were responding to COVID-19. | ||
| But this contract did not apply to Guard members who were there to respond to the protests. | ||
| The government of D.C. didn't evict anyone. | ||
| They just stopped payment for the housing because they hadn't agreed to take it on. | ||
| And as a result, the affected Guard members had to find other lodging. | ||
| There's no scandal here. | ||
| There's no implications of the Third Amendment like Twitter has been having fun with. | ||
| It's just a bureaucratic billing issue. | ||
| Alex is mixing up numbers here intentionally as well. | ||
| 200 was the number of National Guard members from Utah that had to move hotels, which Senator Mike Lee was very upset about. | ||
| 1,200 was the number of D.C. National Guard members who were activated. | ||
| This declaration that D.C. wasn't going to pay for housing these National Guard members applied to all 5,100 people who were activated. | ||
| The 200 number is only relevant because Mike Lee is from Utah, and he's the one who made a big deal out of this and played the victim in a really embarrassing way. | ||
| Yeah, what a dick. | ||
| I don't see instances of, like, governors of other states who had their guard activated playing a wah-wah act, but whatever. | ||
| Everybody's got to whine if you're a white nationalist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wine nationalist. | ||
| We come towards the end of this episode, and I gotta say, I have one piece of bad news, and then I really love something else that happens. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and get the bad news out of the way, and that is that someone's corrected, Alex. | ||
| Well, I tell you, how awesome is Bolsonaro? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like him very much. | |
| Alex has finally figured out how to pronounce Bolsonaro. | ||
| How awesome is Bolsonaro? | ||
| He just took the data showing how awful he's doing off the... | ||
| This fucking... | ||
| How can you praise Bolsonaro? | ||
| Even the right wing that propped Bolsonaro up in Brazil is like, this guy's a fucking murderer. | ||
| Well, it's because his son met Alex at CPAC and talked about how great Alex is. | ||
| That will keep Alex on board despite... | ||
| That is true. | ||
| And he was already primed for that because Bolsonaro kept being called Brazil's Trump. | ||
| So Alex just hears that and he's like, fuck yeah, this guy's gotta be awesome. | ||
| He doesn't know anything. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex calls for what he thinks is saying outlaw the Democratic Party. | ||
| He thinks that's what he's saying, but he's not. | ||
| With a knife? | ||
| Liberalism and leftist garbage needs to be outlawed because it's not a free speech system. | ||
| It's about enslaving us just like slavery got outlawed. | ||
| This modern form of slavery better get outlawed. | ||
| I'm pissed, man! | ||
| So I'm sure Alex just thinks that he's calling for the political party he doesn't like to be outlawed, which is authoritarian enough, but what he's saying is actually worse. | ||
| The term liberalism doesn't mean liberal or democrat or anything like that. | ||
| I know Alex loves to quote encyclopedias, so here's the definition of liberalism from Encyclopedia Britannica. | ||
| Quote, The philosopher John Locke came up with the concept of liberalism, which is defined as a system based on a social contract, where individuals have rights that governments cannot violate. | ||
| When Alex gets on air and argues that liberalism should be outlawed, that has to be heard as a call for a totalitarian government, for one that's not based on the concept of individual liberty. | ||
| I'm sure that's not what Alex means, but because he has no idea what the words he says mean, that is what he's advocating. | ||
| And it makes it all the more hilarious when I tell you this, Jordan. | ||
| Less than a minute before he did that... | ||
| He calls himself a classical liberal? | ||
| I've got a very high vocabulary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very high. | |
| Great. | ||
| So... | ||
| Don't say that! | ||
| Don't say anything about your vocabulary. | ||
| Use words or don't use them. | ||
| So this introduces kind of what I would describe as a segment where Alex... | ||
| He tries to play with words a little bit. | ||
| No! | ||
| He goes on a pun run? | ||
| No. | ||
| He has already botched this liberalism thing. | ||
| He's bragged about his vocabulary and then misused the word liberalism. | ||
| No, everything is a thought crime and his words are fine and perfect. | ||
| Now, here's where it really falls off the rails. | ||
| People think of oligarch as a bunch of top bureaucrats, but it's always them controlling a mob. | ||
| That's the definition of oligarchy. | ||
| Have it right here. | ||
| Or mob rule is the role of government by mob or a mass of people. | ||
| And it goes on. | ||
| Okay, let's get to some more calls here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So... | ||
| That is a perfect, that was a perfect tone shift of just like, okay, let's get some more calls here. | ||
| That was a huge failure. | ||
| You can tell by the way that Alex trailed off there at the end that he was kind of realizing that his gigantic vocabulary was failing him, and he was just making up the definition of an oligarchy. | ||
| If you consult Merriam-Webster, the definition of oligarchy is, quote, government by the few, which is kind of the opposite of mob rule. | ||
| What happened here is that Alex didn't realize he was actually reading the definition of the word occlocracy until he was halfway through it. | ||
| And then he just decided to cover his tracks by saying, it goes on. | ||
| It's an easy mistake to make when you don't prepare and you're just talking out of your ass. | ||
| I mean, those two words do look similar. | ||
| They both start with an O and they end with a Y, which basically means they're the same thing. | ||
| I tried to figure out exactly what happened here, and I did get to the bottom of this. | ||
| Alex is just reading the definition of ucklocracy from the top of its Wikipedia page, and he must have realized they had the wrong word in the middle of it. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| As someone who studied ancient Greek in college, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the ends of these two words are a sure sign that they're different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Oklocracy ends in krasi, which comes from the Greek kratos. | ||
| You find this root word in democracy or aristocracy or theocracy. | ||
| It means power in Greek, which is reflected in each of these terms of social structures. | ||
| Democracy is where the kratos, or power, is rooted in the demos, or the people. | ||
| Aristocracy has the power in the aristos, or the excellent, meaning the power lies in the hands of the elite. | ||
| Theocracy is where power is rooted in the idea of theos, or God, so you end up developing a system where the rule of God controls society. | ||
| Conversely, oligarchy ends in archi, which comes from the word arko, which means to rule. | ||
| Words that end in archi typically reflect the type of rulers there are in a system. | ||
| Oligarchy comes from oligos, which translates to the few. | ||
| It's just descriptive of a system where the few rule the many. | ||
| Aristocracy, meritocracy, or theocracy are subsets of oligarchic systems because the rule of the few can take many different forms, depending on how, you know, the few is defined in a particular society. | ||
| Alright, big word book. | ||
| Alex has a big vocabulary too, Dan, just because he doesn't know other languages. | ||
| Who even speaks Greek anymore? | ||
| Who even speaks English words anymore, Dan? | ||
| They're too big. | ||
| Those are like four pages of words, is what you're doing right now. | ||
| Other examples of this linguistic pattern are anarchy, or the absence of a ruler. | ||
| There's demarchy, which is a system where rulers and officials are selected from a random sampling of the population, making it more of a system where the ruler, the archo, is in the hand of the demos, the people, demarchy. | ||
| Monarchy is the system where there is power in the hands of an individual. | ||
| You can go on and on with this line if you want to break down more stuff in words, but it's an important thing to remember. | ||
| The words mean things. | ||
| When a system is described using kratos or crossy, it's discussing where the power derives from. | ||
| In democracy, the source of power is the people. | ||
| In theocracy, it's God. | ||
| In occlocracy, it's the mob. | ||
| Or in Greek, ochlos, which is a derisive term for a crowd or the rabble. | ||
| When a system is described with a word ending in archo, or in English, archi, it's describing who actually is in a power position. | ||
| Oligarchy has a few in positions of power. | ||
| Monarchy has the king or queen in a position of power. | ||
| And anarchy has no one in a position of power. | ||
| This is a very basic linguistic distinction that anyone with any grasp on language or political science should understand. | ||
| It's staggering to imagine that Alex has been pretending to study political systems for 20 plus years, and he doesn't grasp this very elementary thing about how political systems are described. | ||
| It's really fucking sad, and probably not as sad as him pretending to know the definition of oligarchy, then reading the Wikipedia page for Oclocracy, realizing he makes a mistake mid-definition, then bailing while pretending he was right. | ||
| That's a pathetic level of disregard for accuracy and honestly not very surprising from Alex. | ||
| That's just comically bad. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that I would love for anyone who's curious about Alex or someone who may kind of think that Alex might be right. | ||
| That's the kind of thing that I would really like them to understand. | ||
| He has no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's bluffing almost all the time, and sometimes he really fucking steps in it like that time. | ||
| He doesn't understand the definition of articles, let alone larger words. | ||
| Yeah, and this is pretty bad. | ||
| This is pretty funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, wait, wait. | |
| So what does and mean? | ||
| So where do you use a? | ||
| I enjoy this because I also really enjoy the opportunity to explain. | ||
| Flex your Greek. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| But I think it's really interesting the way that these suffixes to words or the ends of words are important in terms of what they're describing and how you can find these patterns within the words. | ||
| It's important if you want to understand what is the difference between a demarchy and a democracy. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| What is the fundamental difference? | ||
| They both have demos as the root. | ||
| Which is supplementing the end of the word. | ||
| If you understand it, it helps you understand what things mean. | ||
| And Alex can't even recognize on a fundamental level, first of all, that he has the wrong word. | ||
| And second, that oligarchy is an archy, and occlocracy is a crossy. | ||
| So it's just, I don't know, he's just very stupid. | ||
| He's very, very, very, very, very stupid. | ||
| But, I do applaud him. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Because he goes to commercial and he comes back and he admits... | ||
| He's going to take another swing at it? | ||
| He sort of admits that he got the wrong word. | ||
| Oclocracy. | ||
| Latin for mob rule in the rule of government by mob or massive people or the intimidation of legitimate authorities. | ||
| So Alex has figured out that he was reading the wrong definition from Wikipedia, but he's still not correct. | ||
| Oclocracy derives from Polybius, who was a Greek historian. | ||
| The term was adopted by Latin, but it definitely comes from Greek. | ||
| And the point here is, like, Alex wasn't just randomly reading that definition. | ||
| He was in the middle of a rant about how oligarchy is actually mob rule. | ||
| Then he read this incorrect definition. | ||
| I mean, you could make that argument. | ||
| I can, and I did. | ||
| Yes, okay, well, you did. | ||
| So Alex tries to cover his ass here, and it's silly. | ||
| But really, I find that oligarchs will actually create the mob to then overthrow the legitimate government and bring them into power. | ||
| So I find that oligarchies grow out of power. | ||
| The anarchy of mob rule, and our founders were more worried about that than anything else. | ||
| So this isn't historically accurate, and the definitions of these words completely escape Alex. | ||
| Mob rule and anarchy are absolutely not synonymous, but Alex is acting as if they are. | ||
| It's entirely possible for an anarchist system to be implemented in a stable way, and it has literally nothing to do with the signature features of occlocracy. | ||
| Typically, occlocracy is not a functional system of affairs, and it's just the sort of thing that characterizes a period, as opposed to any kind of stable working order or government. | ||
| Examples like the Salem Witch Trials and racialized violence like lynch mobs are more what it looks like in real life, and it's pretty easy to understand why. | ||
| It's just not a sustainable system where anything coherent could get done. | ||
| You can't pass laws with a clocracy. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Post-Reconstruction era South worked out perfectly, right? | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
| No, it's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Oligarchies typically do not grow out of anarchy. | ||
| Many theorists believe that oligarchy is actually the natural result of non-rigidly controlled social organizations as they grow. | ||
| Eventually, the size of the system will be too large for any kind of effective direct representation, and an oligarchy will naturally develop. | ||
| This is the basis of Robert Michael's theory, called the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which posited that as systems grow, they'll inevitably tend towards oligarchic tendencies. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure if that's accurate, but that's something that a lot of people point to. | ||
| It's a pattern. | ||
| It's a pattern that's played out, whether or not you could say that they... | ||
| You know, reasoning behind it is sound. | ||
| It's definitely a repetitive thing. | ||
| The point here is that Alex is just making things up and trying to cover his ass because he realized that he had no idea what these words meant and he didn't want to admit he was wrong. | ||
| Because he's too proud. | ||
| He's such that guy. | ||
| You know that everybody knows that guy who no matter what just can't. | ||
| I was actually right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| But I just misspoke. | ||
| What I was saying was actually right and you're still 100% wrong. | ||
| I'm the smartest guy in this room. | ||
| I looked wrong. | ||
| I have a very big vocabulary. | ||
| Very big. | ||
| Very big vocabulary. | ||
| I believe he actually said hive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Not understanding the word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just too proud. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Too proud. | |
| Too much of a narcissist. | ||
| We come to the last two clips here. | ||
| They're sort of around the same subject. | ||
| And I'm glad that this happened because we get to re-explore the subject of the chessboard skull and rose. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| We gotta close that down. | ||
| Alex did not intend to get back to this subject. | ||
| That storyline cannot go uncircled. | ||
| He gets a call from a former occultist. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And this lady, this occultist... | ||
| Is not so thrilled with Alex's setup on his desk. | ||
| Oh, no? | ||
| Because she is worried that it's possibly a sign that Alex is trying to send messages to demons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that brings me to something that concerns me, and that is something that your camera crew has been panning to the right of you and putting as the center of focus instead of you multiple times now. | |
| And I recognize that that could be used as something that the voodoo, Vudan, Santeria, and people who have ancestor altars, and that they worship. | ||
| So it concerns me. | ||
| But ma 'am, I put that out there. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I don't know if you were tuned in yesterday. | ||
| I was going to put a chessboard out here, and I was going to... | ||
| Let me explain this to you. | ||
| I was going to put a chessboard out here and explain how... | ||
| They're playing both sides off against each other, and the way to win is not play the game and be aware of the whole thing. | ||
| That's not how you play chess. | ||
| Just real quick. | ||
| Just real quick. | ||
| That's not how you play chess. | ||
| He's referencing war games, and that's about tic-tac-toe, you dumbass, not chess. | ||
| And then my dad's a doctor. | ||
| He has a skull. | ||
| I thought the game is death. | ||
| Put that there. | ||
| And then Max Kaiser and his girlfriend, as a joke, sent me flowers that got delivered right as I was setting this up. | ||
| What a joke. | ||
| And I said, oh! | ||
| We'll put some flowers out here, and then we'll ask the cube people what's the secret message, showing how the esoteric stuff and the occult and Gnostic stuff is all about people projecting onto things what they want to see. | ||
| So that's the whole point of this, is this little ensemble all came together that way. | ||
| But I'll come back to you, Dixie, and we'll get to your point. | ||
| So I think what Alex is expressing is that he just chose some random stuff to put out there, hoping... | ||
| That somebody would start a campaign of accusing him of doing some kind of a satanic thing, and then he could be like, no, this is just a... | ||
| It's an attempt at trolling people into giving him free publicity, basically. | ||
| And then whenever somebody actually calls in, and it comes back to bite him in the ass, his explanation is, I wanted people to bring what they brought to it, and she did. | ||
| And now you're all flustered and whining like a baby. | ||
| You're an idiot. | ||
| And it's a joke that Max Kaiser sent him flowers? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Is that because Max insulted him so seriously? | ||
| No. | ||
| Alex explains that I think it's because the two of them are in negotiations about Bitcoin. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go. | |
| It might be a part of the sweetening him up process. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| So in this last clip, the same caller, Dixie, the former occultist, explains that Alex... | ||
| This is the way that an occult person might interpret what you've done. | ||
| So what would an occultist see in this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, you do have the black and white, and we know that that's been used by occultists, those colors. | |
| And then, of course, you have a prepared surface. | ||
| In this case, it's a checkerboard. | ||
| The offerings to whatever spirits or whatever demons or whatever, and, of course, they wouldn't consider them demons necessarily. | ||
| Would be maybe the chess pieces, flowers, of course, and certainly the type of flower. | ||
| Demons like chess pieces? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the most disturbing thing would, of course, be the skull itself placed on the altar. | |
| So if you are an occultist, that might be something that you would use specifically to gain the favor of some demonic entity. | ||
| So it kind of makes me a little nervous that it's on your desk. | ||
| And I know you probably didn't do any invocations or anything like that about it. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I don't have that intent, but my intent was to have to be striking. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That is sad. | ||
| That is really pathetic. | ||
| I'm really bummed out by that. | ||
| Alex, you accidentally did something really demonic on your show. | ||
| I didn't mean it. | ||
| I didn't mean it. | ||
| He can't even just accept a vulnerability of the... | ||
| Look, you tried something a little creative today and it blew up in your face. | ||
| Just say I wanted to be creative. | ||
| Look, I've got these flowers Max gave them to me. | ||
| That's a nice little coincidence. | ||
| There's a skull. | ||
| My dad has a skull. | ||
| That makes me think of my dad. | ||
| There's the chessboard. | ||
| That makes me think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick in it. | ||
| And the only way to win chess is not to play. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| You can't do that if you're Alex because it's a tacit admission that you failed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the way that he's presenting it, he still succeeded because he made something striking or whatever. | ||
| If you say, like, I was trying to be creative and juice things up, but I accidentally too accurately made a satanic altar on my show, that kind of looks weird. | ||
| I want more explanation from her about why demons like chess pieces. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That is something I need. | ||
| Well, it's because they're little people. | ||
| I would assume. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I suppose. | ||
| Little totems, that kind of thing. | ||
| They're like human sacrifices and effigy or whatever. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| That's my guess. | ||
| All right, what about the horses? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you've got to sacrifice a couple horses. | ||
| Okay, that's fair. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So, we reach the end of this, Jordan, and... | ||
| It's so disconnected from reality. | ||
| One more broadcast knocked straight out of the park from Alex. | ||
| That's what I draw from this one. | ||
| This one, let's put another win on the books. | ||
| Let's take a look at the win column for Alex's shows. | ||
| 25,000 million in the win column, zero in the lost. | ||
| It was so spectacularly disconnected from reality and from things that I find important that are going on in the world right now. | ||
| That I might have swung a little bit far in the direction of teachable moments, but I think it's something that's relevant, and I think it's important to understand the way Alex lies, the way he tries to feign expertise about things, the moment that I really think is the most shocking for me. | ||
| It's that moment when he reassures himself about the Bill Gates running Epstein narrative. | ||
| Because that's where you can see him like, alright, I'm going to go with it. | ||
| Almost give in to the natural flow of his lives. | ||
| That's what he did! | ||
| I figured it out! | ||
| It's almost like him resisting for a moment but giving in to the momentum of his own narratives. | ||
| It's a shocking kind of glimpse if you look at it that way because it almost makes it seem like he's powerless over the Whims of his psyche. | ||
| His narratives. | ||
| He's a slave to his own narratives. | ||
| Well, that's a great way to reinvent slavery right there. | ||
| It's kind of a bummer, but I also, you know, I'm not happy for him. | ||
| And it also doesn't excuse anything. | ||
| It's just kind of sad. | ||
| He's just a piece of shit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, we'll be back, Jordan. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| We're also on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight and at go to bed Jordan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And if you would like to download the show, go to iTunes. | ||
| And then if you want, please find a local charity in your neighborhood. | ||
| Please donate to a bail fund. | ||
| Please donate to supplies, anything that you can. | ||
| We're all in this. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZXClark. | ||
| I have a high, perhaps the highest vocabulary. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex, I'm a first-time caller. | |
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |