Today, Dan and Jordan discuss Alex Jones's show from Tuesday. In this installment, Alex overtly lies about at least two stories about Covid-19, pushes an embarrassing Laura Loomer censorship narrative, and continues his path toward accusing Covid-19 casualties of being fake people.
I'm very lucky compared to, you know, you see some pictures of, like, downed trees and what have you, but, like, my lights were flickering, and the tree out in front of my place was definitely bending, much more than you expect a tree to do.
It was pretty scary, and the only thing that really was going through my head was, like, okay, I'm from central Missouri.
I've had a lot of tornado experience.
I know what to do.
I can find some place, even if I, you know, live on a top floor.
If you're out there listening and thinking, hey, I enjoy the show.
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I wanted to send you this novel of complete madness as a way of thanking you for all the great content you've put out over the years.
I've been a fan since 2018 and can't thank both of you enough for consistently excellent content that's entertained and educated me during multiple moves and learning how to paint miniatures.
I think it's so important for people to be introduced to right-wing talking points with critical and well-thought-out rebuttals.
You're essentially inoculating people against these toxic ideologies, and I think that the impact you both have had on fighting the far-rights...
It is a little bit like Assassin's Creed when it tantalizes you with that first aspect that you need to get the super armor, but then you have to wait like 10 full chapters before you can get to the last ones.
They are now officially announcing a plan that when Joe Biden loses in a landslide, despite their election fraud, that they are going to have every blue state secede and have their own inauguration to meet the president and completely dividing this country.
This is how foreign enemies can take down the United States, not with an outward Military attack, but with a collapse from within.
But this is just about what we talked about on the last episode, that war game session, that one of the scenarios that they explored was the possibility of Biden not conceding the election in, you know, like...
So, on our last episode, I mentioned that Alex was vaguely accusing fake people of being included in COVID death numbers, and we discussed how dangerous an evolution that is in terms of his rhetoric.
One of the things that I took the most issue with was the lack of any specific details that would tell people what he was talking about, and at least this time, he's being a little bit less vague.
It was run by an account called sciencing underscore bi.
The account purported to be an LGBTQ indigenous professor at the Arizona State University who had caught COVID-19 and then apparently passed away from it.
People who have looked into the details of the story have found that many elements of that person's story don't match up with reality.
Including claims of teaching when, at a point, no classes were in session, and the fact that ASU had no faculty members die of COVID-19 in the time period when this person was said to have died.
So this person's death was reported by a Twitter account run by a woman named Bethann McLaughlin.
According to an article on Heavy, McLaughlin's lawyer gave the New York Times a statement that said, quote, It's really hard to say exactly what's going on with the situation or what people's motivations were, but from what I can gather, it looks like McLaughlin had been running a fake Twitter account purporting to be an indigenous anthropology professor at ASU for a few years.
In that time period, she had tricked a number of folks into thinking the professor was a real person, and then she decided to pretend that she died of COVID-19.
This is what it looks like from the information that I can find.
This is why specifics are important.
If you're alleging that there are fake people claiming to have died of COVID-19 and this is the story you're talking about, we can engage with that responsibly and look at the details of the story and conclude that most likely what's going on here is a Twitter hoax.
People do stuff like this all the time, and it's one of the reasons why you have to be pretty careful with social media.
However, there's absolutely no reason to pretend that this story involves any of the elements that Alex is claiming it does.
For one, there's no reason to think that this Twitter persona's alleged death is being included in anyone's statistics.
That's a complete fabrication of Alex's mind.
The second thing is that there's no reason for Alex to suggest that this was a work of PSYOP specialists.
That's a claim that he's making that he's obligated to support.
He needs to defend that assertion, which he can't do, beyond just saying it and then asserting and insisting that it's a fact.
What you end up doing when you act this way is that you really end up muddying the waters.
The baseline story is about a really interesting and bizarre case of someone apparently running a fake Twitter account that they decided to kill off with COVID-19.
But because of how Alex is speaking so vaguely about it and making up details to suit his purposes, it's easy for the audience to come away with the impression that things are very different.
If you didn't look into it, you might think that the underlying story in the mainstream media is that a professor at ASU had officially died of COVID-19, but Alex and his crack staff had uncovered that she didn't actually exist.
You can easily see how the conclusion you'd be left with would be different, based on the two different versions of the story, and that confusion is Alex's goal.
It's a twisting of reality that leads people to a desired conclusion.
That's the game he's playing, and that's why specifics are so dangerous for him.
When he first talked about it, it was just, hey, there's fake people dying of COVID, and it's like, well, that's a really dangerous idea to suggest.
But you're not giving me anything to go on, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Now that you bring in that it's an LGBTQ professor who's fake, I can find out what this is, and I can say, oh, this is a completely different story.
It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
From Axios, 97,000 children test positive for COVID-19.
The school's eye reopening.
He thought he might actually go to the report they're using from the National Hospital Association.
He gets his numbers from the CDC, Children's Hospital Association.
They're counting people, and almost all of them are 24 years old.
Or 19. Got him.
They're now counting, just like they count 30-year-old migrants, invaders, Islamist men, as children, and put them in school, in middle school with your daughters.
And German TV says, and atmosphere shows, oh, this is Inga.
She's 14. She has her 18-year-old boyfriend now.
They're getting married.
He's from Syria.
He's like a 30-year-old dude.
They're literally matchmaking your daughters with Islamists.
The reason there's some age confusion about the data in that report that is what Axios is reporting on, which is from the American Academy of Pediatrics, is that the only thing that they can go on is state-level data, and each state has a different way of classifying age cohorts.
If you do go look at the data, you can see this very clearly called out on page 3 as one of the limitations of the data set.
But yet, Alex is still lying.
There's only one state that lists people up to age 24, and that's Alabama.
From the page of Sure.
Tennessee and South Carolina included people from ages 0 to 20, but most states had a cutoff of 17, 18, or 19. If you actually go and look at the charts where the statistics that are being reported are taken from, you'll see a little disclaimer saying, quote, Alabama and Texas excluded from figure.
This is because the state-level data from Alabama was unreliable given the high age range, and Texas was excluded because, quote, Texas reported age distribution for only 8% of all cases.
Neither of these states could be reliably sorted into this data set, so they were excluded.
What this actually means is that the real number of child cases of COVID-19 is higher than what's being reported because there are obviously some children in Alabama and Texas who have gotten sick.
Essentially, what's going on is that Alex is misrepresenting something he doesn't understand about this report, and he's relying on that misunderstanding to report the exact opposite of the truth.
He's saying that these numbers are exaggerating and that they're counting 24-year-olds, but in reality, the only state that goes up that high is excluded from the data set, thereby excluding also the gross number of people who are under 15, 16 years of age.
you're great we're not going to let these tyrants steal the future from us we're going to let this attack energize us to rise to the occasion Music Yeah, Alex's natural environment is giving vapid, pump-up speeches that are pretty aggressive and maybe a little bit insinuating of violence over You Belong to the City.
The article on Infowars relies entirely on a video that Laura Loomer recorded of herself claiming that Xfinity and Comcast have banned her from sending texts and emails to her supporters.
It's unclear how this mechanism would even work, considering that they're just utility providers and her messages would most likely be delivered through third-party platforms like MailChimp for emails.
Anyway.
Loomer provides literally no evidence for her claims in the video, and based on her incredibly embarrassing and deceitful history, I'm not going to take her word on anything.
If a utility is blocking somebody from using their service like a phone or internet based on political beliefs, then I do oppose that.
So I looked into this a little further, and take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, because I found this article on Breitbart.
The article claimed that they had a statement from a Comcast spokesperson who said, We're reaching out to the campaign and have made a technical fix that will resolve this issue within 24 hours.
We're continuously working to protect our customers from potential security threats.
In this case, our security platform, which leverages widely used third-party threat intelligence services, flagged the texting provider used by Laura Loomer's campaign as a potential threat.
Anyone using this texting provider would have had the same experience not only with our service but with any security service using similar threat intelligence lists.
The security alert had nothing to do with the content sender.
Yeah, if this Breitbart article is to believe, then the issue is not related to Loomer's campaign as much as it is that she was working with a mass texting company that might not be very legit.
I mean, she has bad instincts and associates with absolutely shady people.
so I could see her using a disreputable company to handle her campaign correspondence.
Even if this is the case, apparently Comcast's been responsive to the issue and is working to resolve it.
This is, at worst, a normal inconvenience someone might run into in their lives.
But, because people like Laura Loomer are so invested in their identity as a victim, the whole thing becomes a grand plot against them because everyone's so scared of their ideas.
Luma releases a video playing the aggrieved, noble but censored conservative, and then people like Alex can report on that video, unquestioningly accepting her framing because it also serves their purposes and fits their narratives.
As is the case with so much of the stuff we see on Infowars, this is an instance of someone taking their own personal inconveniences and extrapolating them into being broad conspiracies against them.
Laura's texting company is shady, so this ends up being reported as conservatives will soon have no phones.
Alex's wife has to make a reservation at a park, and this ends up being reported as an Agenda 21 takeover of state parks.
Forbes magazine 10 years ago, Michael Fomento, and it goes all over how they staged a whole fake deal with the Rockefeller Foundation and the CDC and Fauci to see how the public will respond.
And what did Gates say three months ago on Colbert?
He said, this is really just a drill.
The real attack's coming from terrorists.
It'll be much worse.
This is a drill.
This is a lockdown drill.
To see how you'll behave.
And if you grovel and behave, they're going to release something far worse.
But with Monsanto, he got in a little bit of trouble back in 2006 when it was revealed that he'd failed to report that he'd profited financially from a Monsanto grant for the Hudson Institute where he was employed.
But the important thing is that it does have a headline that is saying that the World Health Organization faked a pandemic, when the article doesn't prove that.
It's a user-submitted op-ed that got published on Forbes, and this guy has a decades-long track record of basically all of his work just telling people to shut up.
So, for a long time, Alex has been making the claim that on the CDC's own materials, that they say, That, like, all the tests are false positives, basically.
He never really gives any specifics about it, so I've never really been able to engage with it.
In this next clip, Alex gives an indication of where he's pulling that information from.
And, again, he has to not be specific, because when he does, it reveals this stuff.
This is one of the most damning instances of Alex playing games.
This is just a stray line that he found in this document.
He hasn't read this thing.
The full sentence he's reading is, The 2019 novel coronavirus RNA is genetically detectable in upper and lower respiratory specimens during infection.
Positive results are indicative of active infection with 2019 novel coronavirus, but do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses.
The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.
You can easily see the trick Alex is playing here.
He starts the sentence at, quote, do not rule out, which changes the grammar of the sentence.
When you start the sentence that way, it appears to be a command, telling people to do something.
When in reality, the sentence starts with, quote, positive results are indicative of active infection, but do not rule out.
Which is saying that a positive result would show COVID-19, but also that doesn't mean the patient may not be suffering from another condition also.
In proper context, all this line is saying is that if you find someone tests positive for COVID-19, that doesn't rule out that there's a possibility that their diagnosis will ultimately be more complicated.
Alex could not make this misrepresentation without omitting the beginning of that sentence.
So this is absolutely a case of him consciously lying about what the document says, or him repeating a report that someone else who's consciously lying created without confirming it in any way for himself.
There's no way around this, because it's so specific the way the sentence has been changed to start mid-sentence to appear to be a command.
I mean, I would assume that it's second-hand, and Alex just hasn't confirmed it in any way, but the thing that's important to recognize is that wherever it's starting from, it's absolutely conscious.
On the subject I raised yesterday, and the subject I raised today, so I politely ask listeners that are going to call, to call in about your take, your view, on the Democrats, and it now being in the New York Times at the top Democrat strategy meeting, saying we're going to have the states secede, we're going to have our own inauguration, and say Joe Biden is the president, and then the military will have to decide who they believe the real government is.
And they are running around saying the military will then remove Trump.
So Alex has decided that this is the plan, this is what's going to happen, and he wants his audience to commiserate about this because it'll be some fun violent talk.
One, the complete misrepresentation of the guidelines about PCR tests that Alex made by chopping off the beginning of that All right, I'll give you that one.
All right.
Four, his taking Laura Loomer at her word about her dumb campaign for Congress being censored.
There are others, but that's four very serious journalistic fuck-ups that he's made in less than an hour of his show, so I expect that one of these should definitely be the thing that he's apologizing for.
But see, the death number's going straight down like a lead balloon.
But the infection rate is going straight up.
Because...
I just showed you the CDC's own website.
If you had a bacterial infection or the flu or a cold in the last decade, on average, you are going to have the genetic material that you also had if you had COVID-19.
Alex, let's just talk about the concept of time real quick.
Now, let's say that somebody gets the virus and there's, what, a two-week, well, ten-day period in between when you get the virus and when the symptoms start to really accelerate.
And you can't really expect the exact same trajectory as the first time cases were really getting out of control because we have more information than we had the last sort of round, as it were.
And so, yeah, you'd expect a delay just from just sort of how...
And it's not because even one of the producers or writers or researchers found it, but one of our computer switchers, who's a really smart guy, he just decided when he saw this article the other day to go actually read the study.
Yeah, I think what's fucked up is that my reaction to that is, like, in the context of Alex, I know he won't experience any guilt for the actual people he harms.
You know, so when talking about something like this, it's so hard to remember to focus on, like, he's not just going to get himself sued.
So they say, according to this, why, there's record numbers, and then it turns out 90-plus percent in the data from 49 states that report.
One I've been reporting.
Almost all of them are 17 and up, up to age 24. Look at the map.
Yellow is 0 to 14. Only Florida and Utah report anybody testing positive that's under 14. Everywhere else is 17, 18, 19, 20, 24. They're counting people up to 24 in Alabama.
So there's absolutely no reason to suggest that just because a state counts people who are ages 0 to 17 as children that most of the cases of COVID-19 in that cohort must be 17-year-olds, which is what he's suggesting.
There's literally nothing in this report that indicates that, and it's just something he's making up.
Alex has now realized that only Alabama includes people up to age 24 in the definition, but he's still refusing to report that the page he's looking at explicitly says that Alabama data is excluded from the set.
This is really weird to me because, okay, so there's like Florida has zero to 14 is considered a kid, a child in there.
And then so a bunch of other states are zero to 17. And Alex is acting like when it's zero to 17, that actually means 14 to 17. And Florida is the only state that's even counting zero to 14. That's what I thought he was saying.
That is what he's saying.
That is not accurate at all.
That's bananas.
Incredibly scary, because that's either thinking that your audience will accept that, which is terrifying, or just the cognition and the reasoning abilities that Alex has, that's the conclusion that he's arrived at, which is scary.
And if they're going to shut down your access to your internet service provider, what's going to stop them from shutting off your water and electricity?
Oh, wait, they're actually already doing that in places like California, where you have Eric Garcetti, the mayor, telling people, if you have a party or if you don't social distance, we're going to shut your electric and your water off.
If a particular company doesn't want to work with you due to your behavior being distasteful or dangerous, that's not the same thing as Comcast not allowing you to be online.
Laura's blurring that line on purpose because the reality of her situation is a pretty weak grievance and she really wants to be seen as the oppressed hero telling truth to power.
Please keep in mind that less than a year ago she was the co-host of a quote-unquote documentary with Jacob Wall where they went to Minnesota to try and prove that Ilhan Omar was married to her brother.
She's not a serious person and anyone kicking her off anything...
As for that whole thing about L.A. Mayor Garcetti threatening to shut off water and power to houses that are throwing parties, he wasn't talking about houses that actually have people's homes.
These are big houses that are either vacant or used for short-term rentals that people are renting out to throw big parties in because nightclubs are closed down.
And this is a way to have your own little nightclub.
According to the LA Times, quote, Beginning Friday night, if Los Angeles Police Department officers respond to and verify that a large party is occurring at a property, and there's evidence that the venue has repeatedly engaged in such behavior, the department will request that the city shut off water and power services within 48 hours.
These parties are pretty out of control, even if you don't think about it just in terms of the pandemic.
This Times article discusses a recent party on Mulholland Drive that caused a ton of neighbor complaints, many cars that were illegally parked needed to be towed, and it ultimately culminated in a fatal shooting at 12.45am when three people were shot.
People like Laura and Alex want to present this story as if LA is saying that if you have someone over for dinner, they're gonna shut off your water because you're not submitting to their authority.
When in reality, it's basically an attempt to crack down on people using Airbnb mansions to throw fairly dangerous parties.
You can agree or disagree with that tactic.
I think that you could make a pretty solid argument that that's not the best way for the city to go about it.
I think you could make an argument that, hey, it's not a bad tactic.
Whatever.
You could have arguments on either side.
But you do have an obligation to present the story as it actually exists, as opposed to some twisted paranoid fantasy about renegade communists.
I think it's, you know, admirable idealism, but I don't think that it's...
I mean, look, yes, if we could find a way to craft a society where no one could be thrown off of utilities because they can't afford them, I think that's a better state of affairs.
I think that's much preferable.
But I do think, as it stands now, there's a massive difference between ideological and political denial of service for things.
Okay, the Democrats want absolute lawlessness in this country.
And you're either going to vote for President Trump and have law and order and be safe, or you're going to vote for Joe Biden and you're going to have absolute anarchy, communism, no police, increased crime, open borders, and pretty much end-stage America.
Do you realize that six months out of every year, Dan, we get summer because Laura Loomer turned and looked back at that door that she tried to handcuff herself to?
But like I said on the last episode, when we first started touching on this stuff...
There's such a massive difference between sort of clerical admin kind of cover-up stuff where it's someone switching something, an actual death in a spreadsheet and fake people.