Today, Dan and Jordan check in on a very exhausting couple days on The Alex Jones Show. In this installment, Alex tries to launch a distasteful and racist national movement destined for failure, decides he now hates Gov. Abbott, and consoles two of his friends who've recently lost their social media.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey everybody, welcome back to Knowledge Fight, I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan! | ||
| Whoa, that was intense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was. | |
| Is that three ups? | ||
| Scale it down. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| This is a podcast where we like to scale it down a little bit, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Yes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Right at the gate. | ||
| Something is wrong. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| No, I think this is great. | ||
| I think this is great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I got a little overexcited up top. | ||
| Did you start doing hot yoga? | ||
| I did not. | ||
| I did not. | ||
| I just exercised more recently, so now I got all that energy going on. | ||
| You've got to start taking sedatives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something. | |
| I don't know what it is, but that is not okay. | ||
| You've got to start taking sedatives. | ||
| That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. | ||
| I'm used to you yelling. | ||
| Somehow that was... | ||
| You know what it was? | ||
| It was a second into our show. | ||
| It was too much. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Anyway, this is a podcast. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Do you have your hand up? | ||
| Can I ask a question? | ||
| I got my hand raised. | ||
| Dan, what's your bright spot today? | ||
| Why don't you start? | ||
| I'm going to go. | ||
| My bright spot is I finally bit the bullet and I was done with all the side quests. | ||
| And you decided to start yelling. | ||
| Horizon Zero Dawn. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| Did you play the Frozen Wilds? | ||
| Yeah, I played a lot of it. | ||
| The DLC part? | ||
| Haven't finished all of that, but I played a lot of it. | ||
| But I finally played the main storyline, and it's fantastic. | ||
| It's a great ending. | ||
| It's going to be great. | ||
| I don't think it's going to be out until next year, probably, the sequel. | ||
| The sequel, yeah. | ||
| But that's good, because I don't want to buy a PlayStation 5. Have you seen how big they are? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I always get really mad whenever there's new systems out, because it's like, this is how they scale. | ||
| Damn you. | ||
| They lure these games that you want to play and you have to buy the system in order to play them and then they're obsolete and there's a new system. | ||
| I turn into a cranky old man. | ||
| Everyone else is so excited about the new system. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, beta was a better format. | ||
| It was. | ||
| If you had a time stamp on it, it was way better. | ||
| Everything past Atari is a mistake. | ||
| It's a failure, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| Congratulations for you and Aloy. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| She's doing great. | ||
| So here's my bright spot, and it dovetails into the year of the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, now. | |
| So we are now 152 seltzers into the year of the seltzer. | ||
| And that is a moment that deserves a little bit of a celebration. | ||
| So that's why it's my bright spot. | ||
| It's a milestone. | ||
| 150 seltzers? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that's really amazing. | ||
| In like two months. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot of seltzer. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| That's a lot of seltzer. | ||
| And I think that there are some people out there, there are some people who are giving good-natured ribbing about not liking seltzers themselves. | ||
| And I'm like, hey, fine. | ||
| This isn't going to become a seltzer podcast. | ||
| This is just the thing that I'm doing this year. | ||
| To bring some sort of normalcy into the proceedings. | ||
| Because otherwise we're just going to be sitting here talking about Alex Jones all the time. | ||
| It's going to be weird. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrifying. | ||
| There's some things in life that you can still enjoy. | ||
| And I enjoy bubbly waters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| But the other thing I wanted to bring sharp focus to is now 150 seltzers in. | ||
| If you look at the top five seltzers that we have, there are two that are from Mars Brewery that I wouldn't have known even existed as... | ||
| They made seltzers before starting this. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| There is a tie for fifth now between two La Croix flavors. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You got limoncello and hibiscus. | ||
| Hibiscus. | ||
| Yes, both at the 80. 80 out of 100. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I wouldn't have ever tried either of those if it wasn't some sort of thing where I'm trying all of these. | ||
| Naturally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Black cherry coffee. | ||
| It's number two on the list of the top five. | ||
| That's another one I never would have tried if I wasn't doing this, and it's fantastic. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And then three out of the top five, Petal, the elderberry white tea flower. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that was great. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| I never would have known that brand existed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I would have walked right past it at the store. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| I never would have given it a second thought, like some hippy-dippy... | ||
| A little water with flowers in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally, totally. | |
| It was so good. | ||
| And so one of the things that's really nice is being able to force myself into positions where I'm trying a bunch of things. | ||
| And lo and behold, all of the things that I had before are found wanting compared to these new things that I'm finding. | ||
| So it's sort of a microcosm of life. | ||
| A lot of times you do a little bit of an exercise, something that seems really stupid, like I'm going to drink 500 seltzers. | ||
| And what do you know? | ||
| You find... | ||
| Really good ones that you never would have tried before. | ||
| That maybe you can incorporate into your life to make your life better moving forward. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds great. | ||
| There's a joy in discovery. | ||
| So that's my bright spot. | ||
| My thought, though, is when we get to 350 or so, will you be so exhausted with seltzer that nothing is going to break into that top five? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Because there's a lot of the untapped stuff that I might be able to find are things that are more craft in nature. | ||
| So I think a lot of the... | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Because a lot of the stuff I've been having are these standard-ass lemon-lime grapefruit of every brand. | ||
| And a lot of that does lead to a little burnout. | ||
| And some of that's like, well, maybe that would have been a 60, but it's a 52 now because I'm sick of grapefruit. | ||
| Sick of grapefruit. | ||
| Yeah, and certainly apologies to grapefruit, but that's how it goes. | ||
| Also, you're not a great flavor. | ||
| They accept your apology. | ||
| But yeah, I think as we go along, we'll find even greener pastures. | ||
| I'm wondering if we're going to get a perfect... | ||
| I think we will. | ||
| It happens once every 500 seltzers. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I've been very conservative with my scoring, but I think it's possible, and I think if I were to guess, based on how this has gone so far, it'll be something floral. | ||
| And something tea-related. | ||
| Yeah, that does sound likely. | ||
| Yeah, because those are clearly the best. | ||
| One last question before we get off the year of the seltzer, unless you have more to continue. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I have said my piece. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Will you consider revising a score later on? | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| No, I don't think I should. | ||
| I think that would be Dirty Pool. | ||
| It's set in stone. | ||
| Now, let's assume... | ||
| That we get to the end and the highest score is an 86. Okay. | ||
| Does that mean everybody gets 14 more points added to it to be great on the curve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think not. | |
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think that would turn out to things that are 50 are now 64s. | ||
| Yeah, that's just bullshit. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| If it ends up in a situation where we get to 500 and the highest score is 93 or something like that. | ||
| I think that's respectable. | ||
| So be it. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| There is the platonic ideal. | ||
| Of that hundred somewhere out there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it remains to be found. | ||
| There's always something to shoot for. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| That's an okay conclusion. | ||
| Perhaps that's what gives meaning to life in itself. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, the seltzer. | ||
| The year of the seltzer is very philosophical at this point. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's get down to business, Jordan. | ||
| But before we do, we've got to take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| So first, Mr. Malloy, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
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| Thank you, Mr. Malloy. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Habeas Dorcas, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Habeas Dorcas. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Sigmund D., thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Sigmund! | ||
| Next, Profile, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Profile! | ||
| Next, Virginia B. Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Virginia. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Jeff T. And that's G-E-O-F-F. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Jeff. | ||
| Thank you, Jeff. | ||
| Next, Brittany. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Brittany! | ||
| Thank you, Brittany. | ||
| And finally, I'd like to say thank you to a few people who donated on an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate that very much. | ||
| So first, Emmy. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| Next, Gravity Head Zero. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| And Eric R. And I like this a lot. | ||
| This is Eric spelled A-R-I-C. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Like that quite a good spelling. | ||
| That's a dangerous spelling. | ||
| Well, anyway, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now... | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| We got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare. | ||
| Infowar on you! | ||
| Thank you so much, Emmy! | ||
| Thank you so much, Gravity Head Zero! | ||
| And thank you so much, Eric R. Yes, thank you very much to all of you. | ||
| If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoy the show, I'd like to support what these gents do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show, we would appreciate it. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Or you could take that generosity, get yourself some... | ||
| Some glass jars. | ||
| Boil them. | ||
| Boil the glass jars. | ||
| Glass jars go in boiling water. | ||
| Put that generosity in the safely sterilized glass jars. | ||
| Seal them up very tightly and send them to a local charity in your area that can help people in need. | ||
| Yes, we would appreciate that very much. | ||
| That went better than last time. | ||
| That went great! | ||
| I thought that was fantastic. | ||
| So Jordan, today we're going over June 23rd and 24th, 2020. | ||
| This is now my Autonomous Zone. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But before we get to that, we have one more thing, one more little piece of business to take care of up top, and that can be found underneath your notebook. | ||
| Ooh, underneath my notebook. | ||
| We got a piece of mail. | ||
| We got a piece of mail? | ||
| We did. | ||
| What is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit! | |
| There's a note, too, that's probably stuck to the underside of your notebook. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That you can read. | ||
| Alrighty, here we go. | ||
| A gift for you, for Jordan, since you, like other Final Fantasies, MMOs aren't for everyone, but fighting imperialism, oppressive theocracies, and a cosmic horror that's a metaphor for boomer ideology might interest you. | ||
| From PolicyWonkDestin. | ||
| Oh, thank you very much, Destin! | ||
| You didn't say what it was. | ||
| It is Final Fantasy XIV Online. | ||
| I thought I did say what it is. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Maybe you didn't. | ||
| I just missed it. | ||
| Yeah, the complete edition. | ||
| So I'm excited to play that. | ||
| Yeah, you got yourself some Final Fantasy because you talk about loving it all the time. | ||
| Yeah, that's the trick. | ||
| Have you played XIV? | ||
| No, I've never played XIV. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| See, it's an online MMO. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that means that I've always played the single player, single storyline kind of game. | ||
| I've never played an MMO before in my life. | ||
| Neither have I. And I'm worried for you. | ||
| You're worried for me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I might never see you again. | ||
| That's always my fear with those giant online games that are conceivably never-ending. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's my fear. | ||
| This will be my life from now on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| I don't ever want to touch them. | ||
| Yeah, it's always worried me that it was going to become another job. | ||
| I'm just existing in a space where I also have a job on my off time. | ||
| A lot of RPGs are kind of that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| At a certain point, missions do end up feeling... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| When you have to wait a day in real time to farm, what are you doing at this point, you know? | ||
| It's a little exhausting. | ||
| So, now, Jordan, down to business. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I'm going to just tell you this right up top. | ||
| I found it intensely difficult to focus on doing this show for these last couple days. | ||
| And it's because of Alex. | ||
| It's his fault. | ||
| His show's not been good. | ||
| There's still some interesting things and some things that are definitely requiring of us pointing out and keeping track of, but there's so many guests on these shows and it is just like, I don't care about any of these people. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I couldn't... | ||
| I couldn't give a shit for a large portion of the time. | ||
| Sometimes the listening to his show goes quick because there's interesting things pretty regularly or he's being entertaining and yelling like a dum-dum. | ||
| This is the opposite. | ||
| It's just hours of listening to him interview people I don't care about. | ||
| That was a little painful. | ||
| However... | ||
| We start here on the 23rd, and I think that we start with maybe one of the more important things that's going on that Alex announces on this episode that is very bad. | ||
| And the rollout is COVID-19. | ||
| It is just the excuse and the hysteria, and that's why we're making a big announcement later in the second hour today of a nationwide movement. | ||
| The movement's going to be called We Can't Breathe. | ||
| The website's going to be WeCan'tBreathe.News. | ||
| It'll be up this afternoon with a video report and a document article and an action plan. | ||
| And I will be out at the Texas Capitol this Sunday at high noon to protest the governor's capitulation to Gavin Newsom and the UN. | ||
| Yes, I heard that, and that really set me off on a bad foot because I was feeling like, oh, God, I don't even want to do this anymore. | ||
| I just see the machinations of it. | ||
| I see what he's doing. | ||
| He's trying to trick people into getting mad at him to get free press. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| He's doing something explicitly distasteful and racist in order to be like, pay attention to me. | ||
| Oh, I'm going to trick you dumb libs into yelling about how I'm co-opting this thing. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Yeah, and it just feels so lame. | ||
| It's just bad trolling he's doing. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| But it's also incredibly offensive. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| Yeah, it's just shitty trolling, but on a genocidal scale. | ||
| He's describing what is essentially biological warfare at this point. | ||
| I'm going to go out and spread this disease to as many people as I possibly can as a form of trolling. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's hard to say how many people... | ||
| How much denial plays into it, too, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair. | |
| So, my first and most important point here is that co-opting the dying words of George Floyd and Eric Garner, which have been a central rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter protests, that's a profoundly disrespectful and racist act. | ||
| Alex is trying to protest the fact that Texas' dumb-dumb Governor Greg Abbott is finally having to accept that his state is in trouble. | ||
| So he's making some moves to put health safety measures in place, like telling people to stay at home, possibly having some mask orders and stuff. | ||
| Alex and his buddies have already protested this. | ||
| They were the ones who were doing all those reopen protests. | ||
| Alex and Owen went out there with their bull horns back at the end of May and yelled about how the state needed to reopen. | ||
| At that point, Texas was reporting a total of 54,509 cases. | ||
| As of June 23rd, that number was 120,370 cases, having reported over 27,000 new cases in the past week alone. | ||
| Alright, so we've flattened the curve. | ||
| Alex has done his part, and it's clearly been shown to have been dumb and a bad plan that he was pushing for. | ||
| On some level, I think he knows that the best he can really do is go back out and argue that the numbers are a lie and Texas shouldn't be afraid of clearly spiking COVID case numbers, and that's not going to get him the attention that he wants. | ||
| But if he flexes his racist muscles and tries to start a we-can't-breathe movement, maybe, just maybe, he'll anger people enough to get them to cover him and give him that attention. | ||
| It's disgraceful and desperate, and I hope that people don't take the bait and give him the free press. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the next day, just coming out and being, after the I Have a Dream speech, just being like... | ||
| I stole a dream, and it's the opposite of your shit. | ||
| We have a dream of a white America. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You missed the point. | ||
| We Can't Breathe is the name of an organization that already exists, whose mission statement reads, quote, Our mission is to create networks of multicultural groups imagining and building a future where people, communities, and races coexist without injustice or disparities. | ||
| Together we're creating deep change in the community through love and peaceful intentions. | ||
| Something tells me that they're going to have a bit more traction than Alex's dumb publicity stunt. | ||
| So I went to his new website, and it's pretty lame. | ||
| It's just got a bunch of InfoWars videos posted on there, and then there's some posters you can download about how masks are bad. | ||
| Here's the thing that I think is really funny, though. | ||
| All of the posters include the web address, which is wecantbreathe.news. | ||
| But in each poster, the apostrophe is included in the word can't. | ||
| If you type the URL in as it appears on those posters, you will never find Alex's website. | ||
| And that just seems like bad planning from a graphic design standpoint. | ||
| They did not really put the apostrophe in there. | ||
| Oh yeah, on all of the posters. | ||
| They put the apostrophe in there. | ||
| And I know a lot of his audience does, if you look at the demographics, they're older people generally. | ||
| Like an old man house phone. | ||
| He's never going to be able to find that website. | ||
| He's never going to find that apostrophe. | ||
| He's going to put it in a teletype. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a strong suspicion that this protest that he's trying to get going will be very underwhelming. | |
| They plan to meet and have a prayer service at the Capitol, then march to the governor's mansion to demand him not mandate mask wearing. | ||
| The part that's a little scary in their write-up is this. | ||
| Any and all freedom lovers are welcome, and then in all caps, mask wearing is discouraged! | ||
| This is dangerous and irresponsible, but I'm not sure that there's a good way to actually discourage or stop them from holding the event. | ||
| I'm guessing turnout will be small, so the best move here is probably just to ignore them and not give it the attention that it's clearly designed to attract. | ||
| The goal is baiting people into giving this attention. | ||
| As you can tell... | ||
| By how Alex named this. | ||
| So the most effective response, I think, as much as it sucks because, you know, it's offensive, I think the best response strategically is just be like, alright, have your little march and just ignore it. | ||
| I propose a better response, and that is rent four helicopters, attach to them a giant glass dome. | ||
| During the protest, have the four helicopters... | ||
| Drop the dome slowly on top of them, and then we're fine. | ||
| And we just call it a day, and we all just walk away, and it's fine. | ||
| We'll put air holes in there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We're not monsters. | ||
| Put a little leaf in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| We'll give them a nice little terrarium. | ||
| They can frolic and play however they like. | ||
| You have an interesting plan. | ||
| It's going to run into money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll tell you that. | |
| Well, there's that. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| So Alex gets to talking about some other stories, and I think he's got a bad angle on this one. | ||
| Separately, Hollywood is collapsing. | ||
| A whole bunch of producers are dying and committing suicide as their pedophilia comes out. | ||
| That is all coming up, and that ties into these giant pedophile networks that are collapsing, that are in big, serious, substantial trouble. | ||
| It is the pedophile network they use to blackmail. | ||
| And control the population. | ||
| Now, yesterday when I started this show, I told you 24 hours left on the tail end of the big mega sale and the items that are still 60-70% off. | ||
| Nailed it. | ||
| Ooh! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| That was sweet. | ||
| That was sweet and smooth. | ||
| That was rough. | ||
| Ooh, no. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You just... | ||
| Ah, that's lubed up, Dan. | ||
| Alex's theory here that there's a bunch of Hollywood producers dying from suicide, I don't know if that's true, but I think he's just embellishing the story of one recent headline about the death of Steve Bing, who apparently jumped out the window of his 27th floor apartment on Monday. | ||
| There's no connection I can find to him being involved in the abuse of children, and Alex is probably pretty close to defamatory statements there if he's not careful. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| A Page Six article about Bing's death quotes a number of his friends who say that he'd been battling mental illness for years, and quote, his close friends are devastated about his death, but sadly not surprised. | ||
| Other discusses trouble with drugs and the fact that he appeared really rich on the surface, but quote, he made a lot of ill-advised investments. | ||
| People imagine it's impossible to run through $600 million, but he did. | ||
| Oh, congratulations. | ||
| I guess if you Brewster's millions, then you win. | ||
| I don't know what to say. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| He made Kangaroo Jack. | ||
| Yeah, well, then he's going to be in the Hall of Fame, that's for sure. | ||
| From all available information, this seems like a tragic story of someone struggling with addiction and mental illness. | ||
| Until Alex substantiates his claims in any way, this is another example of what appears to him just be him making up details about a story in order for them to fit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really, really shitty. | ||
| It is a double exploitation of something that's multiple tragedies, all in the same kind of situation. | ||
| He's exploiting the real pedophilia to score points and then exploiting a man's suicide due to a whole... | ||
| Host of factors, including mental illness, and just moves on with his life. | ||
| Like, that's fine. | ||
| The rest of us have to deal with this bullshit, and he just gets to move on to the next sentence. | ||
| And I'm not unilaterally defending this guy, this producer. | ||
| I don't know anything about him, but from all the reporting I can find, it doesn't match any of the insinuations that Alex is trying to make. | ||
| And that, to me, is the mark of someone who's a real pile of shit. | ||
| But... | ||
| Even though Alex is a pile of shit, that doesn't mean he doesn't want to surround himself with other gigantic piles of shit. | ||
| And we meet the first one here. | ||
| Great to have you here. | ||
| One of the only people as banned as I am. | ||
| Quite an elite fraternity. | ||
| Thank you for joining us, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Alex. | |
| Good to see you. | ||
| Well, you got banned on YouTube. | ||
| Let's get into that, and then let's get into the state of affairs and Trump and where you see this all going and how folks can still find you uncensored, unfiltered at censored.tv. | ||
| Yeah, it's The Last Bastion, the pirate ship. | ||
| I mean, I got the idea from you. | ||
| What about Bandai? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you make your own thing, they can't ban you. | |
| Do you know who that is? | ||
| Do you recognize his voice? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| No! | ||
| Wow, okay. | ||
| I don't recognize anybody's voice. | ||
| Everyone out there listening, play along. | ||
| Write down on a piece of paper who you think that is. | ||
| It's Gavin McGinnis. | ||
| Oh, goddammit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Alright, so we're talking about tits the whole time, huh? | ||
| No, we're not talking about much. | ||
| This episode is not going to be incredibly long, because a lot of it is Alex just repeating nonsense that he says all the time that it would be fucking boring for us to keep going over. | ||
| And then a lot of the rest of it is just him talking to people like Gavin McGinnis, and I don't give a shit. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I'm not really interested in Gavin McGinnis' hard-hitting takes on the present. | ||
| Let me do my impression of Gavin McGinnis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Wah! | ||
| That's a great impression. | ||
| He got thrown off YouTube. | ||
| Yeah, you got him. | ||
| So anyway, Gavin's just on to promote his website. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Him getting banned from YouTube is something I'm sure he's actually been waiting to happen for a while because you can get some promotional attention out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Try and get things to your own platform. | ||
| This is not the first time Gavin's been kicked off YouTube. | ||
| In December 2018, he was booted for repeat copyright violations, and according to an article in The Verge, quote, This is around the same time that Glenn Beck's network, The Blaze, publicly distanced themselves from Gavin, most likely because he's an unfunny, fascist piece of shit. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| Gavin went on to try and get attention by suing the SPLC. | ||
| There were a flurry of stories about that back in February 2019, but mysteriously, nothing meaningful since. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| Yeah, I imagine that's a sign that the case is going well. | ||
| I thought he won against the SPLC. | ||
| Yeah, he took him down. | ||
| They are notorious for their inability to deal effectively with the law. | ||
| Law is in their name. | ||
| Yeah, well, obviously. | ||
| He got back on YouTube pretty quick after that 2018 ban, and now I guess they've banned him again, this time apparently for engaging in speech that's considered incitement towards violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well. | |
| I don't know the specifics, but if I... | ||
| If I know anything about Gavin, it's probably deserved and overdue. | ||
| So I went to his website, and what a roster of losers he's got working for. | ||
| You've got Milo, Alex's former employee, Pizzagate Rambo Joe Biggs. | ||
| No! | ||
| That racist 12-year-old Soph. | ||
| Jacob Wall and Laura Loomer. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| What a crew of dicks. | ||
| Jesus, that's a fucking Italian job level crew right there. | ||
| If you're talking about a terrarium bubble, get them all in one studio for like a marathon or something. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| There's also a way, weirdly, there's a channel where a former boxer breaks down classic fights, which I don't know why it's there. | ||
| See, now that I kind of like. | ||
| Seems very out of place. | ||
| Yeah, I'm fine with that. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Thing is, you can't watch any content on his website unless you have a subscription. | ||
| Okay, well then, go fuck yourself. | ||
| You can't watch any of these people's stuff. | ||
| You have to pay $10 a month or $100 a year to get access to all the stuff that those buffoons put out. | ||
| Oh, that's a steal. | ||
| I can't imagine a talent pool like that being a compelling sales pitch for people, but I'll leave Gavin to his hustle, man. | ||
| That's what you're going to do. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I will give you $10 a month not to read anything by them. | ||
| Honestly, if it was between giving you money and just reading one of their articles per day, I swear to you, I will give you money. | ||
| Now, I was going to say that if it wasn't behind a paywall, maybe I'd do some episodes about Rambo Joe Biggs, but I realized... | ||
| Right before I said that sentence, there's no way I'm going to do that. | ||
| Take it back. | ||
| You take it back. | ||
| Not going to do it. | ||
| So anyway, it's mostly just Gavin whining about this and how the conservatives won't let us say things. | ||
| They are so banned. | ||
| And then Alex is complaining about how all these people who censor us, they're the ones who do really offensive things. | ||
| And then he remembers that, like, Ralph Northam did blackface. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so he's going to try and weave that in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Give it a shot. | ||
| This is not a success. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| But I mean, I never dressed up in blackface because... | ||
| You're a Nazi helmet. | ||
| It's offensive. | ||
| I mean, and people have a right to do it. | ||
| I just never did it. | ||
| You never did it. | ||
| But everybody that did blackface then says, you should be banned. | ||
| So, it's really interesting to hear Alex struggle to come up with a reason why you shouldn't do blackface. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And if you listen carefully, he's starting to say it's too dangerous. | ||
| He corrected himself to say it's too offensive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he was originally trying to say it's too dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well. | |
| Someone's gonna kick your ass if you do that. | ||
| Which is kind of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Also, do yourself a favor and Google Gavin McGinnis and blackface. | ||
| I'm sure he's never done it. | ||
| See what comes up. | ||
| I'm sure he's never done it. | ||
| Fun fact, Gavin's done some blackface. | ||
| And also, one of the times he was a guest on Steven Crowder's show, the title was Time for Blackface. | ||
| Alright, well that's a time I didn't know existed. | ||
| Also in 2014, Gavin penned an op-ed titled, quote, What's Wrong with Blackface? | ||
| Lots of things. | ||
| Alex could hardly have chosen a worse person to be like, Hey, you've never done Blackface. | ||
| You've never done Blackface. | ||
| I've never done Blackface. | ||
| Neither have you. | ||
| And let's never look into that. | ||
| Guy who's publicly defended Blackface repeatedly. | ||
| How is it that you... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex has had Gavin on his show when he talked about how minstrel shows were like respect. | |
| They were a sign of respect. | ||
| There's no such thing as history. | ||
| There's no such thing as the past. | ||
| It's all in the present and hope people forget. | ||
| And usually that's a good bet. | ||
| I mean, let's be real. | ||
| So, Gavin, I can't get myself to care about his interview. | ||
| The more we sort of ignore... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, come on! | |
| Old white men whining! | ||
| That's a great show. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Nah, come on. | ||
| It's not compelling. | ||
| That's why I love stand-up comedy open mics. | ||
| I love to hear old white man whine about things. | ||
| Certainly that's one thing I miss, but I'll have to leave it in the past. | ||
| This next clip we get to another guest. | ||
| This is part of a powerhouse duo that's coming in. | ||
| One old face we've known for a while and one new fresh face on the scene. | ||
| This is some bullshit. | ||
| But there's a big story at ProjectVeritas.com. | ||
| It's linked up on InfoWars.com. | ||
| Facebook content moderator. | ||
| If someone's wearing a mega hat, I am going to delete them for that. | ||
| Facebook insider Zach McElroy will testify before Congress about the Facebook bias. | ||
| He's witness against Trump supporters. | ||
| And conservative causes. | ||
| So, we got another person with Project Veritas named Zach. | ||
| The last one believed in a Zionist-occupied government. | ||
| That's because that one's still... | ||
| The jury's out on that, just so you know. | ||
| So, Project Veritas has got this new video out, and this time they got a Facebook insider blowing the whistle. | ||
| The guy's name is Zach McElroy, and according to him, he was a content moderator for Cognizant, which is a company that Facebook subcontracts to run moderation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This doesn't work. | ||
| No. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's a cognizant, which is weird. | ||
| This is not about winning or doing the right thing or even having a valid point. | ||
| This is about screaming about something that maybe people can turn into something else. | ||
| And I watched the video, and legitimately the first thing that's brought up doesn't prove anything. | ||
| James O 'Keefe asks Zach about the civic harassment cue, and Zach says that 75-80% of the posts in that cue came from Republican pages. | ||
| The first problem is that there's no metrics provided on this. | ||
| It's just Zack's estimation, which I have no reason to believe or trust. | ||
| But even if he is telling the truth and this number is accurate, that in no way proves an anti-conservative bias. | ||
| Maybe there's more harassment being done by right-wing associated Facebook pages. | ||
| Maybe they're Nazis. | ||
| There are other explanations for the phenomenon he's describing, but the conclusion is reached that this is just more evidence that Facebook hates Republicans. | ||
| That's a sloppy assumption. | ||
| And if that's how the video is opening, you can't really have much faith that they're going to do much better as it goes along. | ||
| So his idea, though, is that there would be a 50-50 reporting split if it was objective. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's basically his argument there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| In that queue, it would be equal. | ||
| Even though that's simply not a function of either... | ||
| I mean, it's entirely dependent on human behaviors. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could have a perfectly fair algorithm and it could be like 90%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because, I mean, that's just a facet of the online Republican culture. | ||
| That's not even necessarily all Republicans. | ||
| That has nothing to do with... | ||
| The large section of Republicans all across the world. | ||
| It's purely the ones who are very online, and they are abusive. | ||
| Plus, they never really get into what the civic harassment queue is, whether or not it's just things that are automatically caught by algorithms, or if it's things that are reported manually by people. | ||
| And that could make a gigantic difference in terms of what ends up in that queue. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| There's not enough information in this video for me. | ||
| To trust any of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the rest of it is just kind of a basic-ass Veritas video where people are secretly recorded and their words taken out of context. | ||
| One woman who's interviewed seems like she may be outside a bar, and she says that she deletes conservative posts even if they're not violating the rules. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha! | |
| You got him! | ||
| However, Veritas forgot to cut out the part where she says, quote, I don't give no fucks. | ||
| It's like one week left. | ||
| What are they gonna do? | ||
| Send me to OIP? | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| She's clearly someone who has quit and is working the last days of her job, so she doesn't care if she faces consequences for her actions, which implies that the actions she's describing would have consequences. | ||
| So this video actually proves that deleting conservative posts that are not in violation of the rules seems to be something that employees know is something they can get in trouble for. | ||
| Don't, don't. | ||
| Great work. | ||
| Don't think about it. | ||
| Do not use the parts that make you think about things that's bad, and then instead... | ||
| I do like her quote, though. | ||
| She's got a great quote. | ||
| There's another exchange that they have with a fellow moderator who's saying that she leaves up posts, like conservative posts, even if they're posts that should be taken down. | ||
| So she's kind of like almost a sympathetic person who's in this. | ||
| And then when asked who in the office she hangs out with, one of her answers is, Kevin, he's like the, insert slur for a little person, that I harass about his height. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is making a strong case about this harassment stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Yeah, real good. | ||
| Wait, so their evidence of the sympathetic person is a person who would be... | ||
| Semi-sympathetic, I would say. | ||
| ...who would be in the fucking queue! | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| She's the person who's doing queue behavior, but at work! | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This is just another standard as Veritas pile of trash. | ||
| If Veritas wanted to do some work that actually was meaningful, maybe they could have been like Casey Newton at The Verge, who did an expose in early 2019 about the horrible working conditions that Facebook moderators at Cognizant were subjected to. | ||
| Probably helped along by Newton's reporting, Facebook agreed to a court settlement where they would pay $52 million to compensate for the mental health issues that moderators developed from filtering horrific content on the platform, keeping all that stuff off. | ||
| From an article about this, quote, Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they're diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. | ||
| This settlement covers 11,250 moderators. | ||
| That's reporting that matters and makes people's lives better. | ||
| There's been a big scandal at Cognizant, but you never would see Project Veritas even coming close to it. | ||
| They don't cover actual things. | ||
| They produce fraudulent hatchet pieces for profit. | ||
| Thus, it's not surprising that Zach McElroy has already put up a GoFundMe page. | ||
| He's looking to raise $150,000. | ||
| Oh, you gotta. | ||
| As of the preparing of this episode, it's been up for a day, and he's already raked in over $34,000. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| This is the right-wing grift economy in a nutshell. | ||
| It's very profitable to be a tool of people like James O 'Keefe. | ||
| It's just not a gig that lasts very long. | ||
| So you get your payment here from this GoFundMe, and then there's nothing for you to do. | ||
| And then, I guess, because you've got nothing else to do, maybe you end up working at Project Veritas. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| I don't think that that's going to look good on a resume. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I don't think you're going to step up and make it. | ||
| I just don't understand why conservatives can't demand better live videos. | ||
| Like, James O 'Keefe's videos all suck! | ||
| And they're lazy. | ||
| And half the time, they wind up proving the opposite point than what he wants to make. | ||
| So, demand better. | ||
| Don't give him your money until he makes a better movie. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough because, you know, he had the backing and the support of Andrew Breitbart and, you know, Breitbart association with Drudge. | ||
| And, you know, so he's almost royalty in terms of, like, those connections. | ||
| And I think that, you know, just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's where you put up with trash. | |
| This is Transformers all over again. | ||
| You just can't let them get away with this. | ||
| Well, speaking of that guy, James, he shows up. | ||
| The two guys both show up. | ||
| The Whistleblower and O 'Keefe. | ||
| And so they're just talking about how Facebook could delete all these posts. | ||
| And this is how... | ||
| O 'Keefe, he sums up what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. | ||
| So what Zuckerberg has essentially done here is he's subcontracted out his... | ||
| Bias to these third-party companies like the one that Zach worked for, this Facebook Cognizant outfit, which is where all these content reviewers do their business, because Zuckerberg wants maybe plausible deniability or a degree of separation from the family. | ||
| Oh yeah, when the Hells Angels gets banned in a town, they create a sub-motorcycle gang. | ||
| That's all he's done, like a mafia created little sub-families. | ||
| Uh, what? | ||
| Yeah, the mafia created a little subfamily. | ||
| Facebook didn't create Cognizant. | ||
| No, they created Cognizant in order to do the thing, and then that thing proves that the thing that they did was wrong, Dan. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| James O 'Keefe is making an interesting point, but it relies on a large, unproven assumption. | ||
| In order for this argument to fly, he needs to demonstrate that Facebook subcontracted Cognizant in order for them to express the bias he wanted for Facebook that allows for conservative targeting that he wants to happen on the platform but also keeps his hands clean. | ||
| James O 'Keefe has not demonstrated this at all, so it would be easy to accept literally every piece of evidence that he's presented and believe that this is a problem with Cognizant and not with Facebook. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why this is incredibly sloppy reporting. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| There's another huge problem with this story, and that is that at the end of 2019, it was pretty widely reported that Cognizant Technology Solutions was getting out of the content moderating business. | ||
| They laid off 6,000 employees and told their investors in a financial operations call, quote, within one subset of the content operations business, our work is largely focused on determining whether certain content violates client standards and can involve objectionable materials. | ||
| We've determined that this subset of our work is not in line with our strategic vision for the company. | ||
| In response to the news, Facebook's VP of Scaled Operations, Aaron Chandra, told BBC, quote, We respect Cognizant's decision to exit some of its content review services for social media platforms. | ||
| They had a $100 million per year deal to run these moderation facilities. | ||
| And that sounds like a ton, but you gotta understand, Cognizant is a huge and diverse company. | ||
| Their revenue last year was $16.8 billion. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| They're a giant company. | ||
| Who the fuck are these people? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was announced in the fall of 2019 that their content moderator work would be phased out over 2020, which seriously calls into question a lot of the content and arguments put forth in O 'Keefe's video and this interview. | ||
| It seems like it might be old. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| That sounds like bullshit. | ||
| There's something up here, but I don't know what it is. | ||
| Something doesn't add up. | ||
| And far be it from me to... | ||
| To try and put my finger on it, but I throw this out the window. | ||
| Another important point is that there's a bunch of companies that Facebook subcontracts to do moderation work. | ||
| There's PRO Unlimited, Accenture, Majorel, Genpact, and that's not even a complete list. | ||
| They're a global company. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You need more than one or two companies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you need people to be doing this 24 hours a day, or else you'd have people posting beheading videos. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's gigantic. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's a 9 to 5 gig. | ||
| We'll get to the beheading videos the next day. | ||
| You know, that leaves him up for 14 hours, but that's no big deal, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This is just weak. | ||
| This is a weak... | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Even for Project Veritas, I found this disappointingly weak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, what Alex is describing at the end of the clip there about biker gangs who get banned creating new names... | ||
| That's essentially exactly what Alex does. | ||
| No, hey. | ||
| He constantly tells his audience to post links to news wars instead of info wars since those links make it past blocks more easily. | ||
| Completely different. | ||
| No, exactly the same. | ||
| Completely different companies. | ||
| His business strategy entirely at this point is basically just trying to give shit different names in order to get around bands. | ||
| Yeah, that's the whole job. | ||
| He is a biker gang that has been banned from town that changes their name. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, well, at least he's bad at rebranding. | ||
| News Wars is just going to be spelled with a Z next, and he'll be like, ha ha ha, it's way better. | ||
| So Alex is mad about masks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Because it looks like Governor Abbott's going to mandate wearing masks in stores and stuff. | ||
| Hey, you giant babies, put a fucking mask on next day. | ||
| Alex is not happy about this. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| And even friends and family go, Alex! | ||
| There's no waiver in California or Texas or other states that you don't have to wear a mask in a store. | ||
| And then I pull it up and I say California. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they go like porcupines. | |
| Of course they can't make you wear this. | ||
| California.gov is not an actual website. | ||
| It's ca.gov. | ||
| That's the California website. | ||
| Leaving that aside, of course some people are not required to wear masks. | ||
| For instance, in California, people who are hearing impaired or who are communicating with someone who needs to read lips can take off their mask in a store to communicate. | ||
| People who are at restaurants and are able to sit at least six feet away from other parties aren't required to be masked while eating. | ||
| People who are doing outdoor recreational activity don't have to wear masks as long as they can stay distanced from others. | ||
| There are folks who have legitimate medical, mental health, or developmental disabilities that make it so they could not wear masks safely, and those people are exempt from the requirement, but honestly, if you have a medical issue that makes it so you can't wear a mask, it seems like you might not risk going into places that there are high concentrations of people during an active pandemic, | ||
| This is the angle that Alex is going with, though. | ||
| There are these exemptions, so let's pretend we all have those exemptions, and then we'll get around this thing, which is like... | ||
| Just fucking wear a mask. | ||
| He's doing it like people used to give medical marijuana. | ||
| He's like, no, I gotta cough, so I'm gonna get a weed card, man. | ||
| Now I don't have to wear a mask. | ||
| There's a difference between the two, but it's a similar behavior. | ||
| It's a similar behavior. | ||
| There's a sort of, what's actually happening here difference. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| It just... | ||
| This is another thing. | ||
| This just goes pretty much throughout these days. | ||
| Because he's decided to run this We Can't Breathe march, he's kind of really going hard on this mask exemption thing, and it's just kind of childish and sad, but it's also so serious. | ||
| Yeah, it's insane. | ||
| You're going to get people stupid by acting like a petulant, stupid child. | ||
| Or you're going to get people killed, yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I just don't understand. | ||
| This is stupid on a level that is problematic for me because it suggests that, like, where's the fucking line? | ||
| You know, like, the government mandates you pay taxes, so you pay fucking taxes. | ||
| Well, not only that. | ||
| They can wear a mask. | ||
| It's not hard. | ||
| Not only that, there is a ton of things that you get from paying those taxes that you probably take entirely for granted. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And it's part of... | ||
| Those fucking cops you love so goddamn much. | ||
| Well, for Alex, maybe that's it. | ||
| Or paved sidewalks. | ||
| Or, you know, any number of things. | ||
| I mean, Lake Michigan's pretty gross, but it would be worse. | ||
| It would be real bad. | ||
| If we didn't pay taxes. | ||
| It would be real bad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, there's a hundred... | ||
| It'd be the Thames. | ||
| There's a hundred unexamined things that you just go about your life and you don't realize are taken care of by everyone deciding to chip in and pay for taxes. | ||
| And it's the same thing with this, too. | ||
| The government says you've got to wear masks when you go inside businesses. | ||
| There is a collective communal responsibility that you're taking care of there. | ||
| And that's another thing. | ||
| I didn't cut any clips of this because it was just so consistent and so... | ||
| But Alex is also being like, studies have shown that masks don't protect you. | ||
| And it's just like, well, yes, that's a straw man argument. | ||
| No one is arguing that wearing a mask will protect you necessarily. | ||
| But if everyone wore a mask... | ||
| It's about stopping the spread. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Not curing anything. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just... | ||
| It boggles my mind. | ||
| Like, I'm not saying... | ||
| Blanketly accept anything that the government says. | ||
| But like you were saying with Texas, you know, there's all those benefits that you can take for granted. | ||
| And in this case, it is not one you can take for granted. | ||
| It is one you can see directly in front of your face, which is that people are fucking dying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like, wear a goddamn mask. | ||
| Everybody agree to wear a mask. | ||
| And when people stop dying so much, we'll be like, look at how great it was that we wore masks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think the comparison between taxes gets a little bit murkier, too, because so much of our tax money goes to things like war and the military, and there are a number of people who, like, there are ways to take a conscientious stance of non-payment of taxes. | ||
| That, you know, you take a risk of having to go to prison if you do that, but... | ||
| There are people who have that kind of principled stance, and I think that there isn't an analog for that in terms of this. | ||
| No, there's no downside, other than maybe your face gets a little sweaty sometimes. | ||
| Maybe a little bit. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| Do you have a downside for it? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I'm fine with it now. | ||
| It was a tough first day, probably, because I felt like a dick. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I'm not a guy who accessorizes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| My head's too big for hats. | ||
| I've never had an earring. | ||
| I don't like sunglasses. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, I should get in sunglasses. | ||
| That would mitigate my cross-eye. | ||
| We'll re-explore this. | ||
| I've never put beads in my beard. | ||
| No, you've never put beads in your beard. | ||
| You've never put beads in your beard. | ||
| I'm not a watch guy. | ||
| I'm not a jewelry guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So, like, wearing a face mask was, like, it was a tough little bit of adjustment in terms of, like... | ||
| I'm choosing to do this, and I know people are looking at me as if I'm making a fashion choice. | ||
| And that kind of was tough, but it passed pretty quickly. | ||
| Because the feeling is you're drawing attention to yourself by wearing this accessory, where in reality you would be drawing attention to yourself by not wearing it. | ||
| In theory, yeah. | ||
| I think that was probably a big part of what the feelings were based on. | ||
| But anyway, you can get over it. | ||
| That's what I would advise Alex to do. | ||
| Get the fuck over it. | ||
| So he's mad at Governor Abbott. | ||
| And he actually has an interesting view of how governorships work. | ||
| Alex? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because Abbott has a very interesting view, but it's very wrong. | ||
| Alex has turned on him now. | ||
| Okay, of course. | ||
| Even though he's the most out there, conservative, nonsense governor. | ||
| But he's, you know, he's taking the virus seriously too late. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now Alex is pissed. | ||
| The governor of California sets the precedent, and I told you other states would follow. | ||
| And then Governor Greg Abbott is now literally the mini-me of Governor Psycho Newsom. | ||
| He followed his orders. | ||
| So Texas is not just being colonized by Californian rejects now. | ||
| We are now under Governor Newsom. | ||
| Governor Gavin Newsom is the governor of Texas. | ||
| The governor resigned earlier yesterday and has appointed... | ||
| The California governor as our governor. | ||
| I mean, he might as well. | ||
| I know that Alex is trying to be kind of funny. | ||
| It's not funny, but it really is overly dramatic. | ||
| That's really the vibe that I get. | ||
| It's like a 13-year-old saying his life is over because his crush doesn't want to go to the dance. | ||
| It's exactly like that. | ||
| This governor who does almost everything in line with what I like isn't doing what I like this time, and therefore California now rules us. | ||
| Over! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Kill myself in the streets because now Newsom is my governor. | ||
| So I think there's something interesting about this idea that California was going to put in this mask requirement and then Texas would follow and thus Governor Newsom is now the governor of California. | ||
| An underlying element of this is that Texas would be just following California's lead, but what if I were to tell you that California was not the first state to require masks in public? | ||
| California's order went into place on June 18th, but because I live in Illinois, I know that we've had that shit going since May 1st. | ||
| Well, there was that. | ||
| And we aren't even the first state. | ||
| According to CNN, the first state to require masks in public settings was New Jersey, back on April 8th. | ||
| So, according to Alex's logic, Phil Murphy is currently the governor of New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, New Mexico, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Kentucky, Illinois, Hawaii, D.C., Delaware, Connecticut, and California. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| You know, I knew there was a power vacuum, but I didn't know you could really grab it, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, all of a sudden, you go from zero power to fucking... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went from being the governor of New Jersey to being the... | |
| Duke of the West. | ||
| Yeah, not a bad little kingdom. | ||
| Most of the economic centers of the country, certainly. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a lot of leverage, I suppose, at any negotiating table. | ||
| You got California, New York, you got Illinois. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Anyway, just a stupid idea of how they're like, oh, he's doing what California did. | ||
| But I recognize that he's saying that as an attempt at comedic hyperbole or something. | ||
| But he says it a lot. | ||
| He says it over and over and over again. | ||
| It's not funny the first time. | ||
| It's not interesting. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's a failure and just sounds like a baby. | ||
| Also, it's one of those things where it's like... | ||
| How long before... | ||
| It'll be next week whenever he's like, Governor Abbott is the best governor in this state because he did this. | ||
| And you're like, what the fuck is the point? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Nothing matters. | ||
| Like he does with Barr. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Attorney General Barr. | ||
| He goes back and forth on that guy. | ||
| Hate him! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Love him! | |
| Hate him! | ||
| He's the real deal. | ||
| I heard from the deep state that he's the number one guy. | ||
| So Alex gets into talking about some of these exemptions that are available for people with masks. | ||
| He's dumb. | ||
| Persons who are hearing impaired are communicating with a person who is hearing impaired, or the ability to see the mouth is essential. | ||
| Just tell them you're deaf. | ||
| Persons for whom wearing a face covering would create a risk for the person related to the work as determined by local, state, federal, and regulations and work-safe guidelines. | ||
| Yeah, they just passed a law in California. | ||
| You're exempt if you're brown from wearing masks. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| I'll show it to you. | ||
| So, pretty cool to hear Alex say that in order to get out of wearing a mask at a store, you should just lie about being deaf. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What a revolutionary we have on our hands here. | ||
| Yeah, man, that's the trick. | ||
| You know, when you're willing to die for your cause, slash pretend you have a disability, you know, that's what the, you know, the Boston Tea Party was not about that. | ||
| It was about adopting... | ||
| Tea-less? | ||
| I got nothing. | ||
| I do have to admit that I frequently lied about being a student to get cheaper movie tickets in my life. | ||
| I mean, that's fair. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Slightly different? | ||
| Same behavior. | ||
| Saving those two bucks. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A little bit different than saving a life. | ||
| That last part is really interesting, the last part of his clip. | ||
| It's not entirely made up, but the story he's talking about wasn't California. | ||
| It was in Oregon. | ||
| This was a specific thing in Lincoln County in Oregon, population 49,000, which is 90% white and less than 1% black. | ||
| The reasoning behind what they did, where they made an exemption for people of color to not have to wear masks, the reasoning is explained by Trevor Logan, a professor at Ohio State. | ||
| Quote, wearing a mask seems like a reasonable response unless you just sort of take American society out of it. | ||
| When you can't do that, you're basically telling people to look dangerous given racial stereotypes that are out there. | ||
| After the raving media picked up on this story and started reporting on it, the Lincoln County Board was flooded with calls from people yelling at them about how this was racist against white people. | ||
| Quote, we passed this last week and didn't hear much, and then all of a sudden our call center blows up with people just yelling at whoever answers the phone, Lincoln County Commission and Spokesman Casey Miller said. | ||
| So they withdrew the exemption. | ||
| Whatever you think about the exemption, whether it was a completely stupid idea or it was well-intentioned but misguided, one thing we can be sure of is that Alex has no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| He said it was the state of California, when in reality it's a small county in Oregon who's already reversed the exemption. | ||
| As is so often the case, Alex is angrily misreporting about a story that is no longer even current. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just wasting his time. | ||
| You know, it's really frustrating how well the right can weaponize an old man house phone version of a DDoS attack. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, they just... | ||
| You just get all of these idiots to yell about this made-up... | ||
| There was a war on Christmas, or people are fake... | ||
| There's a tampon in my fucking... | ||
| The MIAC report. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then all of these fucking ding-dongs just call and yell, and that's enough? | ||
| That's just enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| We've been walking the goddamn streets getting tear gas left and right, and it's enough just to call a bunch of dicks. | ||
| In this case, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, actually. | ||
| I don't think I have any kind of real position to speak on whether or not that exemption is appropriate or not. | ||
| I would like to err on the side of hearing from the voice of people who would be affected by it. | ||
| So I don't really know. | ||
| If that would be an insulting kind of exemption to be put in, or if it would be something that people would be in favor of. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think they should just put a muzzle on their cops. | ||
| That would be interesting. | ||
| That would be a better way to go about it. | ||
| Put a muzzle on them, put a nice little leash on them. | ||
| They can carry sleighs. | ||
| You know, do the whole thing. | ||
| So, we have one more clip here from the 23rd, and it's Alex as a guest who I've never heard on before, and I couldn't even be bothered to look into him, and I actually turned off the episode. | ||
| Is that boring, huh? | ||
| Real boring, and also, after I heard this clip, I was just like, I'm not going to listen to Alex interview somebody who's inspired by Alex. | ||
| I'm not going to listen to him interview a fan of his who now has some sort of a website. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I can deal with Alex. | ||
| I don't need to listen to the The second-hand version of him. | ||
| On the show today, we have a sycophant. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hooray! | |
| Fuck that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks for having me. | |
| We can start with what you said when I watched you back in about 2004 or 2005. | ||
| I remember you very pointedly saying, folks, they're going to bring back human sacrifice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The UN, Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, it's Aztecs. | |
| So I heard you say back then. | ||
| And I thought that was a little off, right? | ||
| I was already kind of conspiracy woke at the time, but I thought, surely not. | ||
| And you know what I did, Alex? | ||
| I went and I got at my library about 40, 50 of the elite books, and I went through them all. | ||
| I plowed through them. | ||
| And sure enough, you were right. | ||
| I actually tracked down examples of where global elitists like Arthur Kessler in Ghost of the Machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He says, you know what? | |
| Since everything is natural, Anything that occurs is natural. | ||
| It's all just natural process. | ||
| All of history includes human sacrifice, cannibalism, these kinds of things. | ||
| It's all just natural. | ||
| There's nothing right. | ||
| So here is one of the top Royal Society type elites literally saying everything that you said. | ||
| So this guy's name is Jay Dyer. | ||
| I don't know anything about him because I don't care. | ||
| Yeah, he sucks. | ||
| Ghost in the Machine is a philosophical text, and this dude's analysis of it is basically proof only that he's not equipped to handle dense material. | ||
| The book itself is Arthur Kessler's attempt to explore the duality of the human, the difference in the mind and body being in the same unit. | ||
| How can a creature so advanced and capable of such intellect also be a creature that's prone to thoughtless violence and whims of nonsensical passion? | ||
| That's the central question that's being dealt with in this tract. | ||
| In the book, he has one section titled, quote, The Ritual of Sacrifice, wherein he discusses the history in human history of human sacrifice. | ||
| Here's how that section opens. | ||
| Quote, anthropologists have paid far too little attention to the earliest ubiquitous manifestations of the delusionary streak in the human psyche, the institution of human sacrifice, the ritual killing of children, virgins, kings, and heroes to placate and flatter the gods. | ||
| It's found at the dawn of civilization in every part of the world. | ||
| It persisted through the height of antique civilizations and pre-Columbian cultures and is sporadically still being practiced in the remote corners of the world. | ||
| The usual attitude is to dismiss this subject as a sinister curiosity belonging to the dark superstitions of the past, but this attitude begs the question of the universality of the phenomenon, ignores the clues that it provides to the delusional streak in man's mental structure and its relevance to the problems of the present. | ||
| In the context of the book Kessler uses the phenomenon as, quote, early symptoms of the split between reason and emotion-based beliefs, which produces the delusional streak running through history. | ||
| According to his belief, quote, the refusal to accept death either as a natural or as a final phenomenon populated the world with witches, ghosts, ancestral spirits, gods, demigods, angels, and devils. | ||
| The air became saturated with invisible presences, as in a mental home. | ||
| Most of them were malevolent and vengeful, or at least capricious, unpredictable, insatiable in their demands. | ||
| They had to be worshipped, cajoled, appropriated, or, if possible, coerced. | ||
| Hence the insane gesture of Abraham, the ubiquity of humanity. | ||
| The holy massacres which have continued ever since. | ||
| If anything, this book encourages the pursuit of a cure for what he calls this delusional streak. | ||
| Since left unchecked, Kessler believes that this could result in human self-extinction. | ||
| And that cure is obviously sacrificing everyone. | ||
| No. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| That was not the sense that I get. | ||
| No, I'm pretty sure that's what he was advocating. | ||
| I don't believe that this guy has read this book. | ||
| And if he has, his assessment of it reveals he's not good at assessing information. | ||
| Probably explains why he's a big fan of Alex, though. | ||
| You know, a lot of people really don't understand. | ||
| Reading is hard if you're doing it right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It takes time. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| You should take notes. | ||
| Well, and, you know, to be an active reader, you've got to engage with the thought. | ||
| Just don't be like, oh, look at this. | ||
| He's saying human sacrifice was all over, and it happens in all cultures. | ||
| That must mean it's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it does seem odd that... | |
| It's something that always makes me laugh about the whole, like, you're in an English class, you speak English. | ||
| And it's like, no, no, no. | ||
| Just because you can read words doesn't mean you can read. | ||
| Like, that's just the reality of it. | ||
| And that's why we have those English and literature classes. | ||
| And that's why the people who make fun of us for having those classes... | ||
| I say shit like this. | ||
| And you can, like, even hear just in the way he's presenting this stuff, it's like a bad Alex impression. | ||
| Like, his impression, his literal impression of Alex, not too shabby. | ||
| Not terrible. | ||
| But the impression of, like, I went and I got 40 to 50 high-level globalist books. | ||
| The elite books. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Get the fuck out. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's just basically someone who's like, I see what Alex is doing. | ||
| I'm instinctually aping it. | ||
| And if they're the fucking elite books, why are they in this dude's local goddamn life? | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| Because Ghost of the Machine is a very widely available book. | ||
| Yeah, because it's a widely available book for people, not just the elite. | ||
| They just want to throw it in your face, though, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Why would they put it in all the libraries? | ||
| Libraries have to buy the book and put it in there. | ||
| Lesser magic. | ||
| They have to tell you what they're doing. | ||
| So are librarians all in on it? | ||
| When they're ordering books, like when you open a new branch of the library, are librarians like, oh, well, we obviously have to get the lesser magic books. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I stand corrected. | ||
| So, we get to the 24th, and there's not much going on here, because, again, Alex has a bunch of guests on this episode. | ||
| Doesn't really want to do any work, huh? | ||
| I don't know what the deal is. | ||
| I think... | ||
| The sense that I get is, like, I think that this Jay Dyer guy maybe has a big audience. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know who he is. | ||
| Maybe me saying this is like, you don't know who Jay Dyer is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have no idea. | |
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I think Alex thinks that Gavin has a pretty broad appeal. | ||
| I think that he thinks that this Project Veritas is like a big scoop that's going to go places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woof. | |
| So I think, and, you know, some of the people that he has on this episode. | ||
| On the 24th, too, are people that I think he thinks is going to broaden his reach and maybe help promote his rally with the masks. | ||
| It's real sad when you go clout chasing at the bottom of the barrel. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| When you have to dig down in there to go clout chasing. | ||
| We got Gavin McGinnis coming in here. | ||
| A lot of people shooting for the stars. | ||
| And you're just going digging out the bottom of the fucking... | ||
| If we keep digging, you're going to get to China. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We got James Woods coming on. | ||
| Steal a little bit of his luster. | ||
| Give me a Scott Baio and we're good to go. | ||
| The reason I couldn't come up with a good name and James Woods kept sticking out in my head is that James Woods is the right guy, but he wouldn't go on InfoWars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Even he wouldn't. | ||
| So we start off and we got the narrative about the NASCAR is in effect. | ||
| And so you look at this NASCAR driver, Bubba B.S. Wallace, saying that the rope to pull down the garage was a noose. | ||
| I guess a noose big enough for a cat's neck. | ||
| And he's this big hero. | ||
| I can't pretend that I know all the details of the Bubba Wallace situation, but I'm pretty comfortable with saying that Alex doesn't either. | ||
| He spends a lot of time on this episode going on about how Wallace is trying to get attention for himself and make a hoax hate crime. | ||
| I'm not particularly concerned with Alex's theories about this because he has the very basic facts of the story wrong. | ||
| Wallace didn't report the noose. | ||
| Someone who worked in his garage found it and reported it to NASCAR. | ||
| Wallace himself only found out about it after NASCAR's president, Steve Phelps, contacted him to inform him of what had been found. | ||
| Ultimately, an investigation determined that the noose had been there since at least 2019, but there was no way for the guy at the garage to have known that. | ||
| He was part of Wallace's team, and they had just been transferred to that garage. | ||
| The guy who found it checked out the other garages before reporting on it and found that no other garages have door pulls that are tied like a noose, which was part of what caused alarm. | ||
| When it was discovered that this wasn't an attack that targeted him, Wallace said, That's bullshit! | ||
| There are a lot of people with a lot of questions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Further investigation of those cases is needed for sure. | |
| But even without that, it's easy to see how the world's circumstances make it so something like a noose being found in the NASCAR garage that happens to be used by a black driver. | ||
| That's not something you can. | ||
| really ignore, particularly if you're NASCAR. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like the way that the chain of information rolled with someone finding this, checking the other garages to see if like. | |
| Am I making a big deal out of this? | ||
| This might be a coincidence. | ||
| Maybe this is a NASCAR thing. | ||
| Finding no other nooses in any of the other garages, reporting it to NASCAR. | ||
| Once NASCAR hears about this, they cannot not act on it. | ||
| And then Bubba Wallace finds out about this after that from NASCAR. | ||
| The chain of events happened exactly how it could. | ||
| But Alex is trying to turn it into Jesse Smollett. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's what he's trying to do. | ||
| Over and over and over and over again. | ||
| And so that's... | ||
| What a prick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What a prick. | ||
| Whoever put that noose in there is a prick, too. | ||
| Why are people putting nooses places? | ||
| Yeah, because NASCAR did release a picture of it that I saw today, and it's a noose. | ||
| Yeah, that's a noose. | ||
| Let's know not noose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not something that you're mistaking. | ||
| Who's using a noose in there? | ||
| That's a terrible idea. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| I mean, there's one version of the genesis of this that something fucked up. | ||
| Like, somebody who's really fucked up. | ||
| Or it could have been somebody who, like, I don't know, it's weird to have skulls and stuff everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, it could be Halloween, honestly. | ||
| But it's still, take the noose down. | ||
| Just take a noose down. | ||
| Yeah, if you're moving out of the garage and you had that up for your affectation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Take your noose with you. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| It's the campfire rule. | ||
| Leave it better than when you got there. | ||
| That would have been probably the appropriate way for this to be handled. | ||
| Because you never know who's going to experience what you're leaving behind. | ||
| Always take your noose with you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That would have been better. | ||
| So Alex now, he's doing his march on Sunday at the Capitol in Austin, but he wants this to be a nationwide movement, which, spoiler alert, it's not going to be. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Let me hit the key point here. | ||
| This needs to happen everywhere. | ||
| Don't wait for orders from headquarters. | ||
| This Sunday, your Capitol, your city council, your county seat, you may be one person, you may be ten people. | ||
| But if you've got a real church, you should go have your open-air church service. | ||
| Even if you believe the COVID hoax, that's the safest place to be, out in the sunshine and preach the First Amendment, which is free speech and religion. | ||
| So that's why we're having this rally for free speech and open-air church service. | ||
| Everybody's welcome, whether you're Christian or not. | ||
| This Sunday at the Texas Capitol in the governor's mansion is approximately 300 yards away. | ||
| We're going to march up there and just say, shame on you, Abbott. | ||
| Shame on you. | ||
| I can't wait to see the... | ||
| Relative size of the protests. | ||
| Oh, it's going to be huge. | ||
| It's going to be huge. | ||
| Compared to... | ||
| Women's March levels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| All around the globe, even. | ||
| Going to have, like, 70 people in Austin. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe more than that. | ||
| Maybe a couple hundred. | ||
| And then compare that to the, like, tens of thousands of the Black Lives Matter protests. | ||
| Man, I can imagine the howl. | ||
| It would be deafening beyond all reason, but... | ||
| If I could, I'd have a little agency in the IRS that's just sending people around waiting for this kind of stuff with a little signature on losing your tax-exempt status. | ||
| Just waiting there. | ||
| The moment he's like, and that's why we should vote. | ||
| You'd be like, bye! | ||
| Pop out of the bushes. | ||
| That would be fascinating. | ||
| Surprise! | ||
| No more tax-exempt status. | ||
| That's never going to happen under Trump. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| But that would be really interesting. | ||
| You doing this would be crossing the line between your church's now political action. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Just have somebody waiting in the bushes. | ||
| They're announcing when this is going to happen. | ||
| Have a nice little stamp made up that says, no more tax exempt status. | ||
| That would be wild. | ||
| Oh, I'd love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, don't think it's going to happen. | ||
| Nobody expects the American Inquisition. | ||
| Alex is really desperate. | ||
| About this mask stuff in a way that I don't fully understand. | ||
| Like, I understand his version of it. | ||
| He's like, this is getting you to submit so tyranny can come in. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't agree with his assessment, but I get he's saying that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think he even believes that. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| But there's an intensity behind it that leads to even sloppier work than normal. | ||
| Here's an example of the stuff we've been posting. | ||
| I am exempt from all regulation, manating face masks uses in public. | ||
| Wearing a mask. | ||
| It poses a health risk to me. | ||
| Under the ADA and HIPAA, I am not required to disclose my medical conditions to anyone. | ||
| Department of Justice, ADA violation, information line 800-514-3001. | ||
| Organizations and businesses can be fined $75,000 for the first ADA violation and $150,000 for any subsequent violations. | ||
| Attention, government agents. | ||
| This is something a citizen made. | ||
| We've put it over at... | ||
| I can't breathe. | ||
| We can't breathe. | ||
| We can't breathe. | ||
| News. | ||
| And a bunch of other flyers. | ||
| But this is the law. | ||
| This is accurate. | ||
| This is the truth. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| When I first saw it on social media, I thought there was about an 80% chance that Alex would be tricked by the fake mask exemption cards that were going around. | ||
| And it looks like he has. | ||
| This should come as no surprise, seeing as he had Dr. Rima Labo and General Stubblebine. | ||
| I was about to say, I was thinking about the Stubblebine, just going like, ooh, 40 bucks, send away your 40 bucks and get a card. | ||
| The laminated Don't Vaccinate Me card. | ||
| This is a grift that goes deep in the right-wing world. | ||
| Never-ending. | ||
| So this card went viral online, but it's a meaningless piece of paper. | ||
| There's no backing of the Department of Justice or the ADA to carrying this card, and refusing someone to enter into your store who's carrying that card and not wearing a mask would result in no penalty whatsoever. | ||
| The card has a website on it, the FTBA, or the Freedom to Breathe Agency. | ||
| Oh, goddammit. | ||
| This is not a real entity, and their website links to a shitty Wix page that's already been taken down. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| All that was there, like that website in its original form, it was just there to data harvest and solicit donations. | ||
| It's just yet another right-wing griff trying to take advantage of vulnerable people who are scared about the pandemic, but are also super weird and paranoid. | ||
| As it turns out, the Freedom to Breathe Agency is just an alias of another recently created group called the Anti-Mask Task Force. | ||
| I guess they thought that their new name sounded better and was more conducive to them pulling off this card hoax. | ||
| I think it's that little tongue twister, Anti-Mask Task Force. | ||
| I guess that's not really a tongue twister. | ||
| That kind of has a ring to it, honestly. | ||
| I prefer that name. | ||
| So, on the 23rd, Alex had Gavin McGinnis on because he got kicked off YouTube. | ||
| Now we get another guest who's been kicked off things. | ||
| We've got Carpe Donctum, who just got banned, Trump's favorite meme maker, because he dared criticize CNN. | ||
| He'll be joining us. | ||
| Carpe Donctum did not get kicked off Twitter for daring to criticize CNN. | ||
| Pretty sure he did. | ||
| It was for repeated violations of copyright rules, the most recent of which might end up completely derailing his life. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| So the Donct manipulated video of a couple of toddlers to create a parody that was supposed to look like a CNN report out of it. | ||
| The video itself shows a black and white toddler recognizing each other and running towards each other to embrace. | ||
| The version that the doc put out was made to appear that this was a CNN report and the chyron said, quote, terrified toddler runs away from racist baby. | ||
| And it suggests that the white baby is a Trump supporter. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| So the structure of the video is that it shows that. | ||
| It's like this is like CNN's, how they would report this story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then it goes to... | ||
| What the actual story is, and it shows the babies hugging. | ||
| Because they're fake news, and yes, it's very clever, that meme. | ||
| And Carpe Donctum, well, even his argument is like, they're proving my point, because all they do is show the beginning of it. | ||
| They don't show the part where I say what the real story was. | ||
| They don't need to. | ||
| The part where you're lying about CNN and this shit is at the beginning. | ||
| Who cares about the second part? | ||
| You just don't understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not relevant. | |
| You're missing my point. | ||
| Well, that's fine. | ||
| Maybe I am missing your point, although I didn't. | ||
| From a very basic level, I can see how this could fall under the heading of being satire and protected by free speech, but even if that's his argument, the satire is really bad. | ||
| He's trying to suggest that CNN would cover this story as a case of a racist baby, but CNN did in fact cover the video when it came out, and they covered it as a heartwarming human interest story where these two babies are friends. | ||
| The impression that the doc was hoping to express with his supposed satire piece is directly contradicted by reality, so it fails to really be satire as much as it is just race-baiting and white victimhood propaganda. | ||
| That's all this is. | ||
| I swear to you, if I could, I would start a consulting... | ||
| If anybody was interested, I would start a consulting firm purely for judges and the like on what satire is. | ||
| Like, I'll just be there, I'll just have complete written summaries of why something is or is not satire, and then we can deal with the First Amendment. | ||
| I would never want to do that because, like... | ||
| You know, bad satire is still protected. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| No, I'm not saying... | ||
| It's shitty satire. | ||
| That's why I don't want to be involved, because I would want consequences for shitty satire. | ||
| If I have one specialty, it is knowing what is and is not satire. | ||
| Regardless of its quality. | ||
| I'm not measuring good or bad satire. | ||
| Maybe that's a good role for you. | ||
| I think it'd be great. | ||
| I will recuse myself. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Ultimately, whether or not this video is satire is probably the least of the doc's issues. | ||
| According to an article in Forbes, the parents of the children are suing Carpe Donctum, real name Logan Cook, for using altered footage of their children without permission to create a video that was a quote, advertisement and political propaganda. | ||
| One of the parents' lawyers said, quote, the fact that Twitter and Facebook disabled this fake video within 24 hours of President Trump and his campaign tweeting it, coupled with Twitter permanently banning Cook. | ||
| is very strong evidence that a jury will likely find that all of these people broke the law by using this video as advertisement and political propaganda. | ||
| It's tough to say which direction this is going to break, but even if the lawsuit isn't successful, it's important to remember that Carpe Donctum is a huge piece of shit, and the parents of the children that he used in a race-baiting propaganda video to support Trump don't want their kids being used like that, which makes a lot of sense. | ||
| It's shitty. | ||
| It's real shitty. | ||
| My lawyer said Carpe Donctum can go fuck himself. | ||
| That was a really strong statement he put out, but nobody asked him. | ||
| So, it's unfortunate. | ||
| I mean, look, I don't know where this is going to go. | ||
| But I certainly hope that Carpe Donctum gets sued. | ||
| Yeah, this is one of those situations where you know for a fact that it's wrong. | ||
| And then you go into the legal system and you're like... | ||
| I don't fucking know how they're going to view it. | ||
| Who knows what the shit is going on with their heads, but it's wrong. | ||
| If it was your kids, how could you not be entitled to some sort of compensation for that? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Your fucking 26-month-old child is being used. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For purposes that are abhorrent. | ||
| Without your permission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or contact or anything like that. | ||
| And you would assume that CNN, when they covered the video, they got permission to use it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would hope so. | |
| Because that's how most of these outlets work. | ||
| Generally speaking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's called ethics. | ||
| I really hope that there's a hammer coming down on this donk. | ||
| If they're the heroes that take down, like, let's start, let's get that turned into a movement. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Just start suing shitting people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Punishing the donk? | |
| Yeah! | ||
| So, Alex gets to Carpe Donctum a little bit down the road, but before he does, he has another interview, which is with a lady named Bonnie Kudlip, who apparently used to work on Abbott's, Governor Abbott's campaign, but now works overnight doing stocking at an HEB grocery store, but doesn't work there anymore because she refused to wear a mask and got fired. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| This seems to me to be someone who's just there to talk shit about... | ||
| Governor Abbott. | ||
| That does sound like what... | ||
| And promote the upcoming I Don't Want to Wear a Mask march. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's Governor Abbott's Larry Nichols. | ||
| So she's on, and they talk about this situation. | ||
| There's some weird stuff here. | ||
| But Bonnie Kudlip, who I've met before at a Second Amendment rally... | ||
| I saw her when she was behind a desk there, and then I went out to, you know, during a break, she came in and was sitting down, telling her story about being fired from a major grocery store chain here in Texas, HEB, for being an overnight stalker, and saying, I don't want to wear a mask, I'm exempt from it, I have asthma. | ||
| And then she starts getting up, she has crutches under the desk. | ||
| She's like, oh yeah, I broke my foot pulling the pallets. | ||
| That's another reason they fired me. | ||
| And HEB's known for no workers' comp. | ||
| It's as close to slave labor as you can get. | ||
| Terrible company. | ||
| Terrible people. | ||
| People that own it. | ||
| Family knew them way back at Baylor. | ||
| Just horrible scum of the earth. | ||
| But that's a side issue. | ||
| Now you've worked inside there. | ||
| Recap the story and the parts that you didn't tell folks about your foot getting broken, dragging around this mask. | ||
| Dragging around the mask. | ||
| I have no idea what's true about this story about this woman being fired for not wearing a mask. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| If she is someone who has a legitimate condition that would exempt her from wearing a mask, then I assume that she should have a pretty decent wrongful termination claim. | ||
| but at this point, all I have to go on is that she's saying these things on Infowars, which doesn't really fill me with a lot of confidence. | ||
| What I find more interesting is how detached from any real semblance of principles Alex is here. | ||
| He wants to evoke sympathy for Kudlip, so he's talking about how HEB didn't pay her workman's comp, but if I'm not mistaken, based on his political positions, he shouldn't believe that employers should be required to pay that kind of compensation at all. | ||
| Workers enter into a contract of employment aware of risks involved, and forcing an employer to pay for any clumsiness or carelessness of his employees, that's an undue burden, and it's a breach of the freedom of association. | ||
| His professed libertarian ideas should make him believe that Bonnie had no right to the job if she wasn't doing it to the satisfaction of her employer. | ||
| She entered into the contract with the employer and she breached the terms of it by refusing to wear a mask. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This is one of the reasons that libertarianism is pretty tough to defend in the real world. | ||
| Alex, standing by his principles that he pretends to have, would require him to side with HEB over Bonnie, even if she is very sympathetic and has a broken foot. | ||
| The very safety nets that we have to protect someone from being unjustly fired or to force a company to pay for on-the-job injuries, they only exist because of the work of people Alex would call demonic globalist communists. | ||
| Go fuck yourself, Alex. | ||
| You want to live in the world that your enemies create. | ||
| That's why you live in Austin. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Dumb asshole. | ||
| No, it's like when my oldest brother was on unemployment when this started, and it's like, then shut the fuck up forever. | ||
| You never get to speak again. | ||
| You never get to complain about other people having access to social safety nets. | ||
| Say to yourself, thank God I had this unemployment check to help me get through this time. | ||
| And then what happens? | ||
| Then you start thinking, well, other people, if they go through this time, should they deserve that same kind of thing? | ||
| And then all of a sudden, every conservative bullshit line you get is over. | ||
| But they can't do it. | ||
| Socialism for me, not for everybody else. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Alex demands workman's comp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, fuck off! | |
| And employment protection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And paid maternal leave. | ||
| Fuck off! | ||
| You don't believe in any of that stuff, Alex. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| You're not supposed to. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex is going socialist. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| For me and my white friends and no one else. | ||
| So, I don't care about their interview. | ||
| Like I said, I can't find any news stories about her being fired or anything like that. | ||
| So, I don't have any... | ||
| Perspective on it outside of what's presented on Infowars. | ||
| And quite frankly, I don't care. | ||
| If that's all the information that I have, then I can't really work with it. | ||
| I don't even trust that she's got an actual broken foot. | ||
| She's on Infowars. | ||
| I believe her. | ||
| I don't believe anything. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So he gets to Carpe Doctum, and it's just like, if they can take me out, they can take anybody out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know about that. | |
| At the top of the list, it's top down. | ||
| I am Spartacus, kind of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whatever, Doug. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And this is just the only clip that I thought was pretty funny. | ||
| Just last week, Carpe Donctum and I were playing phone tag about him going ahead and getting a site on Banned Out Video because of all the censorship. | ||
| And then, voila, big national news story breaking yesterday. | ||
| Carpe Donctum banned for the video we're about to play. | ||
| Now, for radio listeners, you've got to go to Banned Out Video to see it in the streams. | ||
| Carpe Donctum's had a fucking channel on Bandai Video for a long time. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He's just in negotiations to get it. | ||
| He's had a channel, the Meme World channel, on there for a long time. | ||
| Well, yeah, but I mean, it was there, but it's not, you know, it's not there. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| No, everybody cares. | ||
| Everybody cares real hard. | ||
| This is another one of those things where it just feels like Alex is trying to cash in on some sort of attention that these people have, like, a flicker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a little bit of a window where it's like, and even Carpe Donctum says something to the effect of, like, It's really nice to talk to you whenever there's chaos. | ||
| And it kind of feels like, yes, the only time that you are valuable to Alex is when you get banned from something. | ||
| And he can hopefully get a little bit of that attention. | ||
| Does he say it like knowing what's going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's hard to tell. | |
| Or is he somewhat oblivious? | ||
| Like he's aware unconsciously of the pattern. | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| It could be a knowing wink of like, you keep doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Or it could be a thing where it's like, you know, hey... | ||
| Life's a whirlwind. | ||
| It's always nice to take time out of my day to talk to you. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It's really hard to tell, but I found it to be a little bit telling, whatever the intention of it was. | ||
| So he's going to get this Bandai video page that he already has. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And Alex discusses this. | ||
| This is the last clip that I have, because he just interviews Larry Pinkney, the guy from the Black Panthers, again. | ||
| Yeah, great. | ||
| And I don't care. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's just the two of them yelling about patriots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kids! | |
| Patriotism! | ||
| Patriots! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Yeah, I don't care. | ||
| Wah! | ||
| And so, this is the last clip, and it's them talking about band.video, and Alex basically admits why he's censoring everybody on his own website. | ||
| That's so stupid. | ||
| Carpe Donctum. | ||
| Anybody who wants a channel out there that is a known quantity, obviously we put random people on, they'll get us sued, but we're going to have a forum on there where it's like third party, just like the Section 230. | ||
| So, he understands that if he opened up his platform the way that large corporations and large online platforms do, he would get sued. | ||
| And he knows that in order for that not to happen, he has to censor content by not even allowing most people to upload stuff onto there. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And he gets it. | ||
| He understands. | ||
| For his own space. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He gets it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I am willfully lying about stuff. | ||
| That's so annoying. | ||
| Yeah, it's very annoying. | ||
| You can't get away with it! | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| It's like James will keep shitty videos! | ||
| Like, demand better! | ||
| I think it's actually kind of a good sign, because I think it means that people just don't give a shit. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably true. | ||
| And maybe that's... | ||
| This cesspool is ours and ours alone now, Dan. | ||
| Maybe that's a conditional bright spot. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Anyway, that brings us to the end of this. | ||
| I found these couple days tragic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really bad. | ||
| Just a fucking Sahara Desert of interest. | ||
| I don't care about any of these dicks. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| The Donctum has things to say. | ||
| I don't care about Carpe Donctum. | ||
| I don't care about Gavin McGinnis. | ||
| I don't care about James O 'Keefe. | ||
| He started Vice. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| James O 'Keefe. | ||
| He's the lead live investigator. | ||
| I don't care about this Facebook guy, cognizant guy trying to run a grift. | ||
| Hey, he's going to be testifying in front of Congress. | ||
| No, he's not. | ||
| I don't care about any of this stuff. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| She broke her foot. | ||
| It just all seems very desperate and it feels attention grabby. | ||
| And you add that in with the We Can't Breathe website and March and all this stuff. | ||
| It just feels like this show... | ||
| It doesn't always feel like this, but this stretch of time particularly just really feels like impotent, weak trolling. | ||
| And it's just not interesting at all. | ||
| It kind of feels like this was the first time that they really did get together in a writer's room and toss around ideas, and all of the ideas were like... | ||
| Oh, he's got a little heat on him. | ||
| Let's bring him on the show. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, how could we be more racist and offensive? | ||
| Let's just brainstorm ways. | ||
| And let's not check and see if We Can't Breathe is already the name of something. | ||
| Don't bother. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no way anyone else could have thought of this. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We're Infowars. | ||
| We're the tip of the spear, guys. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I pray for rain, metaphorically, to create some greenery. | ||
| Are you joining that Austin prayer group before you go? | ||
| I will not be doing that. | ||
| You won't be doing that? | ||
| I'll be staying home. | ||
| That'd be funny if they were praying for rain. | ||
| We'll see what happens, but I'll be back on Monday for another episode. | ||
| But until then... | ||
| We have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| I gotta get knowledgefight.news so Alex can't get it. | ||
| Also, I should ask him for a channel on band.video. | ||
| If it's a free speech platform, we wouldn't do anything to get him sued. | ||
| That's actually true. | ||
| Yeah, we should start making videos for band.video. | ||
| I don't think that would go well. | ||
| I think that would break the no interfering with the observation. | ||
| Super conflicted about it, though, just as an experiment. | ||
| I would like to have a channel. | ||
| Would he let us? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Right, but he should. | ||
| Of course he should. | ||
| I feel like this might be a point where I could break the non-intervention thing. | ||
| Oh, do you think this is... | ||
| Well, because we could wage an entire campaign. | ||
| Like, let us on Band.TV. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Coward! | ||
| Why won't you let us... | ||
| I do think that's a good idea. | ||
| I do too, but I don't want to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's our same attention-seeking bullshit that we criticize him for. | |
| However, this would be fun. | ||
| And satirical. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We both did the same point at each other with the word. | ||
| And the reason it would be satire is because we would have absolutely no intention of actually making videos on his site. | ||
| Of course not! | ||
| I'm going to say we're not going to do this, but keep it on the back burner in case we get too bored. | ||
| Maybe we should have that as an outrageous Patreon goal. | ||
| In case I'll break glass. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight and I go to bed Jordan. | ||
| And I'm going to scoop up at Carpe Doctum, which is now available. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| We're also on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| We're going to be on the show, review, iTunes. | ||
| And if you could, please find a local charity in your area. | ||
| Support a bail fund. | ||
| Support something along those lines for people doing God's work right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I'm the juiciest ice cube. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |