Today, Dan and Jordan discuss how Alex Jones ended the past week on his show. In this installment, Alex discusses his support for the federal government's actions in Portland, introduces a confusing new supplement line, and closes the show a bit creepy.
Well, anyway, we're going to go over that episode, and it's a mess.
It's stupid.
And at the end, it gets really, really inappropriate and very fucked up.
Of course.
In a way that I probably normally wouldn't cover, but because Alex has been out of studio, and honestly, I don't know what to do with this situation anymore, that I generally err on the side of not covering.
I still have a little bit of uncertainty of exactly how to deal with things and how to treat him as a media entity, but at the point where Alex is constantly pushing him to the forefront and having him on his show...
He might have learned a few things from Gavin, and we'll see about that in a moment.
But before we get down to business on that, Jordan, we're going to take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show.
Now, Jordan, in lieu of an out-of-context drop, I do think, you mentioned this earlier, and I do think that it is relevant, and that is that over the weekend, or maybe...
But I also believe that your friendship and relationship and history with Donald Trump weighed more heavily than him just wanting to make sure that justice was done by a person in the justice system, that you were treated so unfairly.
There are thousands of people treated unfairly daily.
Hal, your number just happened to come up in the lottery.
I'm guessing it was more than just luck, Roger, right?
I don't really feel like arguing with this, me, bro.
And I don't really care about Rainbow Snatch's stupid interview.
She's showing up on the show to claim that Joe Biden is secretly a radical and that if he gets elected, he's going to use climate change fears to introduce his own climate Gestapo full of SJWs who want to force you to use different light bulbs or something.
It's very stupid and it's very difficult to listen to.
I pulled out that clip though because I felt like it really well captured the insincerity and lack of curiosity in the right wing, particularly in people who have anointed themselves as the people in the world who are responsible for conveying information.
If we're to believe Rainbow Snatch, she saw some Democrats connecting climate change to COVID-19, and her response to that seems to have just been rejecting the idea, not exploring it any further, and then bringing it up condescendingly on Alex's show, so as to give the audience the permission to reject the idea as well without doing any further analysis.
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What kind of idiot would say that the weather affects viruses?
If she cared about the reality, she could have learned something by actually engaging with material and reading up on the subject, which is actually really important, this topic is, in terms of the future of the planet.
If she wanted a nice boil down of the topic, she could have read ProPublica's piece from May 7th titled, quote, How Climate Change is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease.
The number one threat to humans in terms of unknown and undiscovered infectious diseases are animals that live in habitats like dense forests and, quote, wild and remote places out of reach of humans.
Under ideal circumstances, the animals, like certain bats that carry diseases and humans...
They would never make contact with most of them under normal circumstances, and there would be very small risks in terms of them infecting people and spreading to human hosts, whatever they're carrying.
However, there are a couple trends that have been happening that affect things that make the world we live in not ideal.
The first is that we're engaging in massive deforestation around the world, seeking to turn wild land into areas that we can use to make money.
The second is climate change, making previous habitats inhospitable to animals, causing them to move, like to seek out new sources of water and food or just good living.
And sometimes because of these moves and these migrations, they end up closer to humans.
These two forces combine to increase the chances that animals that could carry new and novel infectious diseases will be in closer proximity to human settlements and also increase the likelihood of them infecting a person and causing an outbreak.
This is a very real concern, but it's not even the entirety of the concern from climate change as it relates to disease.
From this ProPublica article, roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals, including those pressured by diversity loss.
And roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development, or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings.
Vector-borne diseases, those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people, are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.
Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from frozen reindeer in 2016, which came down from the Arctic and haunt us from the past.
This is not some new idea that people have just trotted out because of COVID-19.
You can easily find a retrospective study in the journal Environment International from January 2016, which discusses the history of scholarly literature on the connection between climate change and human infectious diseases.
If you read even a little bit of the information on the subject, it honestly starts to become laughable that anyone would think it would be possible for climate change is not Yeah.
Completely blindsided by the idea that we live in a global ecosystem wherein one thing, even though you think it's unrelated, one button you think is unrelated to every other button press actually sets off a chain reaction of button presses leading to consequences that you cannot understand unless you, I don't know.
It seems to me that in order for this to be true, her feeling to be true, or this mocking of this connection to be true, she must take issue with all germ theory, more or less.
There are a ton of ways that the changing climate can lead to very real new dangers in terms of public health, even if you're only talking about the subject from the perspective of infectious disease.
So when Rainbow Snatch wants to come on Infowars and hand-wave away the subject, I find it kind of difficult to take anything she's saying seriously.
When I say that these people, like Millie and Alex, are not serious people, this is a great example of what I mean.
When they encounter an idea that seems like a problem for their worldview, they don't consider the idea and try and understand it.
They immediately decide that the idea is liberal nonsense and then make up their own story about it.
That's not good work, but it's all these people are capable of.
That's why when Alex sees this Twitter hack, he's just decided to write a little novella about it.
Every single introduction for every interview should include he got sued for lying about a guy on InfoWars and had to apologize and tried to blame an underling.
Yes, I think Trump needs to push forward as he would have normally pushed forward.
I think the reason they're creating all of this is to try to hide the fact that Joe Biden doesn't have as much support as they would hope for him to have.
Try to hide the fact that he's really weak at debating.
He has issues from his strokes and whatever else.
I mean, they know that his policies are going to be called out.
They know that Trump is going to be the person to lay out just how bad Joe Biden is.
And I think that they're just trying to avoid that.
You know, there's a lot of people who think it's important to have those debates, and I can understand where they're coming from, and then I think that you have a very valid point that who gives a shit?
Wow, speaking of that, I think, so it's Tuesday as we're recording this, so I can't actually say for sure that Millie's prediction didn't come true, because who knows?
I mean, this evening, as John Gabrus says on podcasts a lot, night's a puppy.
Don't know what's going to happen this evening, but Millie will be wrong tomorrow if this doesn't happen.
Well, I'm going to be careful how I say this, but there may or may not be some joint four stars having some problems on Tuesday pertaining to the New York Times op-ed.
But that's all I can say.
So as far as what's coming next, that seems to be in the works.
So, we haven't talked a whole lot about this, because Alex hasn't really talked a whole lot about it, but there's been a lot of goings on in Portland.
There have been nights upon nights, 50 or so nights of protests surrounding the Justice Center there.
We're going to talk about his breakdown of this a little bit, because I think it gives a lot of really good perspective on what's actually going on from a local perspective and from the perspective of somebody who's been there.
I've watched a lot of his streams and then some other folks who have been streaming.
On our last episode, I was saying that I don't have a real good sense of what's going on, and I still think that that's kind of the case.
I've apprised myself, and had by the time we recorded last, a lot of resources of people's, but I mean, I'm in Chicago.
I think that there's only so much of a perspective that you can get without...
And to that end, I feel like it's a story that would be very difficult to cover, especially as it's still active and going on because of the distance from it.
The same way that I feel like it would have been really hard for us to talk about the precise things that were going on with the autonomous zone.
I don't know exactly.
You kind of have to find some resources you can trust and go from there.
And so, we're going to talk about it a little bit, because Alex finally actually starts talking about it.
After seeing the video today, Senator Wyden wants to know who's in charge of those officers, saying when Donald Trump sends federal law enforcement into Portland with no accountability, core questions about the physical safety and civil liberties of peaceful protesters are sure to follow.
So we'll talk about the specifics a little bit more as the episode progresses, but for now, I just want to draw sharp attention to how the only primary source Alex ever trots out in these circumstances is that stupid fake Soros Antifa contract that Harrison Smith found on 4chan a couple years back.
This hoax-ass document is behind so much of his argument that it's legitimately embarrassing if you actually...
So I was going through my files and I realized that I'd actually taken screenshots of all the pages of these fake documents since I was worried at the time that I couldn't rely on Alex to keep them up on his website.
In this section, you'll learn that if you're a Soros Antifa agent and you get into some hand-to-hand combat, quote, closed fists may be used only below the neck and above the belt.
So these documents are embarrassing and obvious fakes, but I started looking into it a little more, and I found something really interesting.
According to a recent article in Reuters, these documents have been resurfacing on social media, with people claiming that they were found at a George Floyd-related protest.
Fuck off.
Anyway, there's some added hilarity that can be found in this Reuters article.
For the longest time, Alex has been saying that these documents are between Antifa and George Soros' son, Alexander Soros, because that's the only son Alex knows about.
In reality, the document claims to be from Friends of Democracy, which is a PAC that was founded by Jonathan Soros, one of Soros' other kids who Alex doesn't know about.
Whoops.
Also, these forged documents appeared online in 2018, but purported to be from 2015 in the aftermath and unrest and protesting surrounding the killing of Freddie Gray in April of that year.
It had gotten reorganized and merged in 2014 with another group called the Public Campaign Action Fund, and the new organization's name is Every Voice.
They're specifically a group focused on promoting the candidacies of folks who are running for office whose platforms include getting money out of campaigns.
That's what they're about.
At the time these contracts were supposed to have been made, the shadowy evil Soros company that is said to be involved didn't even exist.
This is very sad.
Even, like, tragic levels of fraudulent shit going on here that Alex is trying to present as real.
Yeah, you're just going to laugh at him, and then they're going to be like, well, look at Joe Biden laughing at the sacred honor of the title of president.
You can almost feel the desperation in Alex, though.
This guy who he loves and helped get elected is the guy who's doing all the things he spent his entire career yelling about the globalists doing.
And the only way Alex can make it look like anything other than he's just become a sellout for a dictator is if he has this contract that proves that the enemies that his dear leader is using to justify his crackdown are actual enemies after all.
Unfortunately, the document is fake and Alex is a sellout for a dictator.
I was thinking about this, and one of the things is this is the part where the rubber meets the road, where stuff that Alex talks about is often not fake.
I mean, he's lying about everything.
Of course.
The threat of federal law enforcement being used for law enforcement purposes domestically is real.
So, you know, maybe about a week or so ago, there was that video that went around of unidentified, you know, not wearing any identification, officers putting people in unmarked cars.
There's footage we played a few days ago of them ripping open doors with crowbars, going into the federal building parking garage, and then having to be thrown out.
Yeah, here's some footage right here.
These are people breaking into federal buildings.
Breaking into the federal courthouse so they can try to loot it with a hammer.
And then they get upset and the headlines are, oh, secret police are disappearing people.
So leaving aside that Alex is completely like sort of missing the point, dismissing the larger issues about what's going on in Portland, I want to take a moment to bask in the absurd and pathetic logic that he's using.
There are federal agents acting in law enforcement capacities in a United States city, which is the main thing he's made his career based on screaming about.
Obama was going to launch Jade Helm, Posse Comitatus, FEMA camps, they're all going to round up all the Christians.
That was his primary brand for years, and now we have an absolute clear-cut example of federal agents snatching people up in Portland, and what's Alex's response?
The people who were being detained by unidentified agents in unmarked cars, they weren't trying to break into a federal building at the time, but let's leave that aside for a moment.
If the issue with the protesters in Portland is the building they are trying to get into the parking lot of is owned by the federal government, then that issue is going to pop up in the case of the Bundys too, I'm afraid.
So, it can't possibly be a situation where Alex thinks that the unidentified federal agents have the right to scoop up civilians if they encroach on federally owned things, because if that were the principle, then he would behave differently in other circumstances.
Where things get messy is that Alex isn't covering the actual story in Portland, partially because he doesn't care, and mostly because he sees the optics he knows how to use, so he's using the story the same way he uses every protest story.
Find some clips of someone wearing a black mask doing something that looks scary to old people in the suburbs, pretend it exists in a vacuum, use that perception to justify whatever police violence is used on the protesters, and move on.
This is not a case of out-of-control leftists just trying to take over a federal courthouse to loot it, as Alex is presenting.
And if you want a great explanation of what's going on in Portland like you recommended, I would also recommend Robert Evans' article on Bellingcat, which does a great job of fleshing out how things got to where we are now from the perspective of someone who's been there.
So, as Robert lays out, things in Portland trace back to late May.
On the evening of the 29th, the city had their first protest related to the murder of George Floyd.
This was happening on what would be about the third night of a group called the Youth Liberation Movement occupying the steps in front of the Justice Center, and that is where the protests ended up converging that evening.
A large group surrounded that building and eventually broke in and trashed it.
From Robert, his article, quote, I watched all this happen from feet away, and it's my opinion that the destruction was unplanned, yet more or less inevitable.
You could feel it in the mood of the crowd.
The third precinct in Minneapolis had just burned.
There was absolutely no way Portland wasn't going to try to do the same thing.
The police showed up and they dispersed the crowd using tons of tear gas.
Protest is by definition supposed to be something that's kind of confrontational because that's the way these things work.
As such, things coalesced around the Justice Center as it took on an actual as well as symbolic importance to what was going on.
Nightly protests would occur at the Justice Center and they would often result in police tear gassing and shooting pepper balls at protesters, all sorts of issues with a fence.
Then on July 11th, U.S. Marshals straight up shot a guy named Donovan Labella in the head with a rubber bullet for no reason, which people didn't like.
This was one of the more egregious examples of this consistent pattern that started to form of police violence that has taken place in Portland and is now being carried out with the involvement of federal agents.
Alex's entire career demands that he be on the side of the protesters, but of course he's not.
Ultimately, I have to make peace with the fact that this podcast, you know, we can't do everything that I want to.
This can't be everything.
And it would be impossible for us to give the best, most accurate coverage of this unfolding and very much still ongoing situation in Portland.
So the best thing I can do is say and reiterate two things.
The first is to seek out sources of information that offer larger context, preferably people who have been there and know what's going on.
The second is that there's absolutely no more explicit and damning example of Alex Jones completely giving up the charade that was his career than his siding with the federal government here.
If you're a listener of his show and you accept this mealy-mouthed, but Antifa made Trump send federal troops into active police bullshit.
Except to be a backup of the fake-ass Soros documents, you're a sitting duck for whatever Alex pivots to.
You are a fucking leaf in the wind just being blown along.
Well, you might think you do.
I mean, it's got to be painful.
Anyway, I just see this as another one of these, these like, wow, Alex, you don't realize, or maybe you do realize how big of a deal this is based on Your whole career.
I still maintain that if any of our congressmen or people under the age of 50 had...
Had the will to do it.
If they showed up on the front lines of Portland and made it an international incident that the federal government is disappearing our own politicians now, too, that would be the way to move forward.
I mean, even if it was a leftist group of proud Second Amendment leftists, of which there are plenty, The federal government literally came and took their guns away.
Alex would still be like, see, you've got to take away guns sometimes.
A lot of them are federal marshals, but most of them are U.S. military attached to the hostage rescue team.
So it's the military, and that's why you're getting grabbed and why they're grabbing you off, and then you're getting interrogated because you work for a foreign power.
You work with the CHICOM globalists literally trying to burn the country down, destroy the stock market, and bankrupt the economy.
You're a bad person.
You're a military operative.
You're an enemy combatant.
You're not an American citizen.
You said no borders, no wall, no USA at all.
You go around bullying people with hammers and guns and weapons, and you kill people, and you shoot people at four-way stops because they don't stop fast enough.
It's possible to disagree with the political aims of these people in Portland if you decide to do that, if that's where you are, and still recognize that, like, oh, hey, that's my marquee issue.
I should probably be on the right side of this one.
Those people, those Antifa slimes, are lucky their necks weren't broken.
After they've been hitting old people in the head with hammers and crap.
Just believe me, the people that arrested you and took you in for questioning to get your paperwork of who you're working for would love to break your communist neck.
And then tries to find some nuance, like tries to find some in-between land where it's like, alright, I believe in everything that I've supported Trump for this whole time, but I now recognize that those authoritarian tendencies that I was keenly aware of, and I mentioned, I was very clear on, in fact.
Eh, too much.
Maybe.
It's fucked up.
It's also fucked up to think that if Alex would have just resisted the siren song of supporting Trump, like, what he could be doing, like, how much, like, he's a liar, and everything would have been lies, but the world's circumstances are such that he could be giant right now.
I love Bill Gates and Bezos and all these anti-American slugs that got rich off our system and hate it, who were in bed with the globalists and the chi-coms.
I love it.
I love your private messages are ours.
I love the fact that the media is so stupid that they took the cover story that it's about Bitcoin.
At this point, I see no evidence to back up any of these claims.
Like, I see no evidence that this is a patriot hack against the globalists.
I can see no evidence that all these people's messages have been taken.
And most relevantly, I find it really hard to believe that people like Bill Gates or Obama would ever use a platform like Twitter for any kind of important communication.
If you imagine that they are in fact involved in some kind of a grand-scale conspiracy, there's no chance they'd say anything incriminating over Twitter.
That's what someone like Alex would do, or Roger, with his communications with Kucifer 2.0.
Anyway, this is just Alex writing a story about a world event that's really based on nothing other than his own fantasies about an imaginary war that's going on just past the view of everyone but himself.
This is legitimately no different than Carrie Cassidy arguing that fires in California were a cover for aliens coming in through portals to eat people.
They're both claims that take an actual news story and write their own versions of them.
So, you know, obviously, this whole thing with Alex and supporting Trump doing what he's doing vis-a-vis law enforcement in Portland, it makes sense because what Alex says in this next clip, I mean, it really just, this is pretty clear.
Listen, the federal government's a separation of powers.
It's something we set up a long time ago to supposedly guard our freedoms.
Of course, it's corrupted, out of control.
Everything gets that way over time.
But we'll use it to defeat the CHICOMs and the globalists.
It's the weapon we have.
We can reform it now and later and whenever.
But if you think the federal government's your enemy compared to the CHICOMs and Hollywood and Big Tech, you're an idiot.
We need the federal government.
To clean out the globalists, clean out the Democrat operatives, clean out the hold-behinds from Comey and Hillary and all them that still think they're going to win.
As is pretty much always the case, Alex is reporting on bullshit that isn't even relevant by the time he's on air.
In this case, a man in Florida who died in a motorcycle crash and had tested positive for COVID-19 had been initially counted as a COVID death.
However, upon review, he was taken out of that data pool.
One of the reasons for there being a question about a death like this is that there's a cause for review.
There's a very slight possibility that even in the case of a motorcycle crash, that COVID-19 could have been a contributing factor to the death.
Is it possible that he only crashed because of a bout of severe coughing?
It's probably unlikely, but it's a question that's relevant and people should ask.
Anyway, the state of Florida has explicit exclusion criteria in place that has deaths from trauma, murder, suicide, overdose, and vehicle accidents removed from COVID death data.
So this is basically a non-story that Alex is reporting as huge bombshell COVID news.
So you can kind of see how the goalposts are being moved in order to help maintain the big deal kind of position.
The thing Alex is hiding behind is that in the initial wave of cases and deaths, the largest city in the United States was the epicenter.
New York City has a massive population, and the population density is such that transmission was out of control.
These factors created a perfect storm where there were a large number of deaths in a single area.
As time has gone on and New York has largely gotten the virus in check, the death numbers have dropped drastically in the northeast of the country.
This drop is enough to have masked the surges and deaths that have been seen in the south and in states like Arizona and California and around in the southwest.
These areas are going up pretty seriously, but often in areas that are not of similar populations to New York.
And naturally, the gross number of deaths are going to be lower for the country, even though they're higher in these regions.
And you do need to pay attention to stuff like that if you...
Obviously, I have no idea what's going to happen, but it's a bit troubling to hear Alex pivot from there are no deaths increasing to there are some deaths increasing, but they're in small areas.
It seems like a guy who's just trying to explain away deaths that are inconvenient.
Second, they're not proven to be frauds, and they're also not trying to keep the country closed.
Beyond that, I'm a little bit torn about this move on the Trump administration's part to make the reporting taken away from the CDC and then house it within the Department of Health and Human Services.
On the one hand, if the reporting's being done appropriately and professionally, then it seems like the HHS...
is a relevant department for that to run through.
And ultimately, the CDC is part of the HHS.
You know, if in fact that this is just an instance of rolling out a new, possibly updated system, then it might not be a totally negative thing.
That said...
I don't really trust anything that I just said to be accurate.
I don't trust that the Trump administration is going to make moves to provide better data about a politically inconvenient outbreak.
And honestly, I don't think that I would trust them to make this kind of move, even if it weren't in the middle of a pandemic.
The timing is weird, to say the least.
And it seems like a pretty shady move.
At very least, it's a bad decision because of the timing.
We're in the middle of a public health situation, and making changes to how things are reported is going to inevitably lead to some hiccups.
Anytime you migrate systems, there are some things you end up learning by experience, making mistakes.
Those mistakes could be very detrimental in the current landscape, and we may not be able to afford to make them.
Honestly, they could be hugely consequential.
And that's why the National Governors Association wrote Trump a letter asking that he delay this shift in the system and to make all of the information public.
The chair said, quote, sudden changes impose undue burdens on state health departments and hospital systems which are already working at full capacity.
This wasn't some leftist, globalist nonsense.
This was, quote, on behalf of the governors in all 55 states and territories.
Anyway, what Alex is doing here is cheering for a cover-up.
And we've got a lot of other news we're going to be hitting as well, but I wanted to play the niece of the president who already got paid out a bunch of money and signed a contract in her family not to make stuff up if she got those millions of dollars.
That's a contract.
Every family's got these deadbeats in them.
And now she comes out and she says, Donald Trump says the N-word all the time.
Folks, I checked into Donald Trump.
I know people that have stayed at his house 10, 15 times.
I know people that don't know.
Donald Trump has never said anything racist about black people.
Because you could just say, look, you could say easily what's true for every white person, which is there's been some racism because we're ingrained it in the fucking culture, and we've gotten past it, and we've grown beyond it.
So this is pretty funny to me, and I could have gone and found a compilation of Trump saying completely nonsensical things to rebut this, but I felt that would have been low-hanging fruit, and I can do better than that.
Because I've been listening to Alex for a long time, I remember how back in January 2017, just before Trump's inauguration, Alex got trolled by a guy on Twitter into thinking that tapes of Trump saying the N-word on The Apprentice were about to get released.
This guy pretended to be an NBC employee and just randomly sent Paul Joseph Watson a DM saying this stuff, and without doing any checking into the story, Paul wrote up an article about it, and then Alex filmed an emergency damage control report that went something like this.
We are now about three and a half days out from this historic event taking place, and Paul Watson wrote a big story yesterday concerning a NBC source, and it looks credible.
I'm not saying the report's credible.
I'm saying that the source, it looks like he is at NBC.
They're saying that there is a tape compilation going back over the 14 seasons or whatever of The Apprentice with him sitting in the chair saying things like his son's retarded and making dirty jokes and supposedly the N-word.
You know, the thing about Trump, whether this is true or not, is the top people that have known him for a long time, is he does like to basically tell dirty jokes, anything that a comedian would do.
And he doesn't even do it that often, but almost like a stress reliever or a way to break the ice.
He will sit there and a lot of times actually deprecate himself as well.
So, when I say they just get elementary things wrong, this is kind of...
Just about where I was like, okay, I don't care.
It was really early in the interview, and you say things like this, and it's just like, alright, you end up in a box, and that box is someone who's running a con.
Right off the bat, police killing people is bad, regardless of the race of the victim.
I'm not sure that it's a good argument for people to say the protests about police killing black people are bad because police actually kill more white people.
The larger issue is that the interview that the Honch twins are talking about here included Trump using a very explicit dog whistle to racists.
The interviewer asked, quote, why are African Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement?
To which Trump replied, quote, and so are white people.
What a terrible question to ask.
So are white people.
More white people, by the way.
More white people.
It is true that more total white people are killed by police each year than black Americans, but that is a meaningless statistic in the context it's being used because there are not an equal number of white and black people in the country.
Studies have been done on the differential between the rates, and they've consistently shown that black people in America are considerably more likely to be killed by police.
When the statistics have been adjusted to compensate for population differences.
According to The Guardian, black people are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than white people in America.
Quote, in 2016, black men aged 15 to 34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers, and they were killed at four times the rate of young white men.
This talking point, that more white people are killed by police than black people, is a standard canard that's pulled out by racist folks to try and minimize or invalidate the folks who protest police violence.
And it's a really dumb thing for two reasons.
The first is that using this stat in that way only reveals that you don't really understand the topic you're talking about, or that you have possibly an underlying racist perspective that you're looking to camouflage.
The second is that the natural conclusion of this logic doesn't arrive anywhere good.
Is the point supposed to be that police killings are actually okay?
Is the message that they're trying to push is that black people should calm down because more white people are killed?
Is the problem that folks are complaining about police murders or is the problem that people like Alex have is that the movements don't focus on the right victims?
The logic of this argument doesn't go anywhere.
You have to ask yourself what the actual goal of using messaging like this is, and if you do, I don't think you come up with anything good.
At best, this is a defense of police murders.
At worst, it's a blatantly racist desire for all social movements to center white experience.
And actually, I don't know if that's at best and at worst.
I'm not sure.
But the point is, I don't think there is.
I don't know where this logic or this reasoning goes that isn't...
Because if you don't, if your next statement or sentence isn't, and that is why we must also vociferously support this movement and engage and be a part of it, if it's not, then you're only bringing this up in order to minimize and invalidate the experiences of the people who are protesting, which seems to be saying something along the lines of...
It's cool.
It's cool for police to kill people, and I'm against that.
I guess the best interpretation of somebody saying that, aside from them being like, and that's why we should abolish the fucking police, the best possible interpretation is more white people are getting killed and you don't see them causing problems.
That's the most innocent way I think you can look at that.
I mean, it can't be seen as anything other than an insecure response to somebody pointing out that one, it's not about you, and two, it is a fundamental aspect of our policing system that it is fine to hunt young black men.
And if you absorb that one piece of information, then you have to change every viewpoint you have on policing.
So your insecure response to that is just like, uh, nuh-uh, more white people are killed, so, you know, it's not that big a deal.
Now, like I said, I do not care for people who present their positions this flimsily.
Like, if this is what you're bringing to the table, that Trump's interview was actually good because he made a great point that more white people are killed by police.
Sure.
And it gets worse, because they're aware.
The Hodge twins are aware.
That there is a higher rate of black people killed by the police.
They're trying to say black people are being killed at a higher rate than black folks.
Yeah, but the study takes in the white folks.
I mean, I'm seeing that survey saying black people are getting killed at a higher rate than white folks.
Yeah, that study, they take into account.
The entire population.
Okay, if you want to figure out what's going on, if black people are being killed at a high rate, you need to take into account only police interactions.
Who cares about the lady that's sitting in the old folks' home?
Or my wife who's never been stopped by the cops.
Yeah, you need to look at police interactions, and then you'll be able to determine if black people are being killed at a high rate.
But even then, was the black people walking down the street just flying a kite, sucking on a lollipop?
These complaints with the study that shows that police kill black people at higher rates than white people, these complaints are completely meaningless.
And they really only reveal that the Hodge twins have absolutely no idea how statistical analysis works.
I'm not even going to waste my time discussing this, but I feel like it's worth our time to really see the level of argumentation that's going on.
Like, that's just...
Like, if your complaint with the study is that they take into consideration the whole population, first of all, okay.
And then second, have you tried to look for a study that only involves police interactions?
I mean, also, just intuitively, are you telling me that you have existed in American society for this long and you think that black people don't have a higher rate of police interactions as well?
There's an interesting thing to this, and that is, like, it does seem to me like if they had looked into it, they could find a study about police interactions.
Right, but the fact that they're not bringing up a study that shows that there is actually no difference in police interactions, that leads me to believe that they either haven't looked into that, or they have, and they found, like, ah, that doesn't work for us either.
And your argument is even borne out by the clip, because at the end they show their cards, where they're basically arguing that the people who get killed by the police deserved it.
They've already put out the next talking point that precludes you from even going down that road because you know, okay, well, they're just going to assume.
That these people deserve to be shot by the cops.
And then, okay, we've reached an impasse.
I 100% disagree with you.
And that seems to be the hill that you're willing to live on, and I'm not.
And another thing is, it seems like they have a lot of...
Another reason why I'm not particularly interested in their contribution is because you can see that they have a lot of Alex Jones-y narratives.
That woman who was killed in Indianapolis that we've talked about and that Alex has been using as a race-baity kind of topic, it seems like they have an angle on the story that's exactly the same as Alex.
It mysteriously doesn't match up with reality in similar ways.
There's this right-wing online conception of debating, which is just two people yelling at each other in a YouTube video in an unstructured way, that they just fetishize this.
I've watched tons of supposed debates online, and most of it is complete nonsense.
A lot of it is just bigots trolling, and the rest is people thinking they're blowing people's minds with Philosophy 101 topics they read a Wikipedia page about.
That's not meaningful.
But the online conservatives really think that it's some kind of important part of their culture where they do these online blood sport kind of arguments.
But it is this weird online world of people who think that they're really...
It's meaningful.
And I regret to say that there is a kernel of it that is probably meaningful, if only on the level of how many people are watching those things.
There are large audiences, and people can be swayed by really slick sort of rhetoric that goes on, but honestly, it's stuff that wouldn't fly in a classroom.
When the Hodge twins say that AOC won't debate, what they're saying is that she knows better than to engage with someone like Ben Shapiro, who's desperately begged her to debate him.
Second, the engaging with a study in the way that they did, which is just the flimsiest critique of the study, that is like, okay, I got problems with your problems with the study.
The implication that at the bottom of this argument, well, we're eventually going to get to the point where you're going to say the people just deserve to be shot by the police.
And I haven't had time to get into them yet, but drjonesnaturals.com So now, I try to understand what words mean when they're put in sentences, because that's how humans communicate.
But, based on the way that Alex has definitely in the last six months been talking about quitting a whole lot more, talking about running to the woods, I wouldn't be too surprised if what was going on here is Alex's dad is launching a supplement line for Alex to sell that can shield...
Alex is getting sued by all these people who's going to go out of business if things continue down the road that they're going on.
So, as an insurance policy, hide assets under his dad's name with a business that Alex isn't technically connected to at all, but he's getting all the profits from.
I mean, like, obviously what you're suggesting is what this smells like.
But it's hard to say exactly.
I really don't know.
But Alex is going out of his way to, like, first of all, the way he set that up is fucked up.
There's no need for that.
Yeah, no, that's fucked up.
There's no need for that.
You could just say, we got these great products.
You don't need to say, a year ago I was talking with my dad and I said, I want to quit Infowars and he said, let's start doing that and then now we have products to sell you.
You don't need to say stuff like that because it's fucking confusing as hell.
And it makes it sound like this is your fucking parachute.
We have eight of the products at Infowarsstore.com, and I don't want to undermine any of our products because they're all really, really good, but we have Soreless, we have Rocket Rest, we have Primal Youth, we have Kabachil, and they have Kabachil Extra Strength.
Because they start talking about the governor of South Dakota who was talking about how they didn't close things down and they were able to make things work.
No, this is totally, like, I grew up in a small town.
This is every idiot I know, and then some of them went away to college, you know, the liberal brainwashing machine, and then came back and were like, that was fucking stupid that I said that.
Like, it was by escaping from the influence of your bad, bad parents.
And you want to believe that there's a possibility that that could be something that happens, but at the same time, like, how much of that is giving way too much?
The way I'm approaching this is that in this appearance, it's largely just standardized Infowars stuff, and that doesn't rise to the level of me feeling the need to treat him like...
See, there's an added dimension of creepiness to this, and that is that the South Dakota governor would be Rex's new mother, new mom, new mother-in-law.
So, I mean, but Alex presents himself as a very different sort of broadcaster, and in the conditions that he presents himself, this is unacceptable on a hundred different levels.
Everybody needs to come right with God, and as we all know, God wants me to openly speculate on how much I want to fuck the governor of South Dakota in front of my son.
This is so fucked up for me personally because I'm flashing back to when I was 13 years old and I was like...
I proudly like...
Read the Bible in a week or whatever it is.
And I told my dad, and I was just like, I just want, one, to connect with my dad on a certain level, and two, for him to give me that huge, like, you did good, slugger!
Like, that's what I was going for.
And when he says, I think Stephen Colbert looks like a pedophile, that is exactly the same.
It's almost the end of the fourth hour, so I don't know if Alex came back right at the end or whatever to be like, hey, you should buy these products my dad has.
So we had an episode to do, and it's important to check in on Alex.
And what really forced my hand was the fact that he talked about Portland a little bit, in a way that I haven't really heard him cover the situation at all.
So it's really, really relevant to our interests and our coverage to see him be in support of the federal government, because it's a tool and a weapon that can be used against his true enemies.
But because of that, it really necessitated talking about this episode.
And then, unfortunately, because...
We're covering this episode and there isn't a Monday or Tuesday episode to fill things out.
You know, we gotta talk a little bit about this fucked up weird shit with Rex.
And then also, you know, I might have just ignored the Hodge twins interview, but I think it's a really good case study of someone who I have no idea what their hustle is.
And then you come in, you see these sort of telltale signs of like, this is scammy.
But then again, now that we know that this strategy has been in the works for a year, it does seem like whenever he has mentioned in the past that I want to, you know...