Knowledge Fight #496 dissects Alex Jones’ October 22-23, 2020 episodes, where he peddled absurd claims—like globalists blocking solar radiation to trigger an ice age, 5K-10K "patriots" rejecting FBI bribes, and a false flag Biden assassination—while mocking liberals with baseless attacks. His bizarre metaphors (China as an abusive biker) and misrepresentations of climate science and voting access highlight his erratic, self-undermining style, leaving hosts Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes to dismiss him as a hollow, inconsistent conspiracy theorist. Despite his show’s chaos, Jones’ electoral focus remains as detached as ever, proving his theories lack real-world grounding. [Automatically generated summary]
And, you know, I think sometimes you think about these bright spots and coming into an episode and you kind of think of like, well, I'd like it to be proportional to the dark spots.
And it's not.
And sometimes you just have to recognize that This is about celebrating little things that maybe are not good enough to make you feel good.
We've gotten that down pat, so that this meal that when we started cooking used to take like three hours to prep and all that stuff, get it all done in one hour, eat, it's fantastic, it's great, it's a good accomplishment.
So before we get down to business on this October 22nd and 23rd episode, let's take a moment to say thank you, Jordan, to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show.
I've gotten into conversations with people about this, and some people remember that rhyme as being E-I-O-U, sometimes Y, and W, and some people just think it's sometimes Y. I don't know what is reality anymore, and I'm not looking forward to there being an argument among listeners.
So Alex is on this tip, and we've seen him talk about this a bit in the past, and it's very confusing, but he seems to be putting forth the idea that you can't get sick unless you have vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which is not true.
And I would be...
Fine with it is just bad science and medical advice if it weren't for the fact that he specifically sells supplements of the things that he's saying.
And in as much as he does sell those things, when part of his narrative is that you can't get sick if you have these things, then the conclusion that you should draw from those two...
I've got hundreds of articles, hundreds of things to cover.
I just want to say again, because the fall's here, and people don't get malnutrition, and you're going to die of the flu, you're going to die of a cold, you're going to die of pneumonia, you're going to die of COVID.
You're going to die of tuberculosis.
You think homeless have high levels of tuberculosis just because they are homeless?
No, they're taking drugs and they're not eating good food.
They're eating gas station food and they're taking drugs and they're sleeping outside and their bodies are run down.
Malnutrition can definitely be an aspect of what makes people experiencing homelessness more susceptible to catching TB, but it's far from what experts believe is the largest factor that makes incidents of the condition much higher in that community.
According to the World Health Organization, quote, the majority of TB cases in urban homeless populations are attributable to ongoing transmission in shelters.
Two of the factors that affect the community more than the housed population is that they generally have less access to healthcare, and they find themselves sheltered in far more densely populated units.
Beyond that, because they have no permanent address and often no reliable way to find or contact them, when someone does test positive for TB, it's incredibly challenging for healthcare workers to trace their contacts and get a jump on containment.
Alex wants this to be a simple issue of the higher rate of TB being the result of simple choices these people make.
They get TB because they eat gas station food and do drugs, so it's kind of their fault.
But that's nonsense.
Through much of my early 20s, I ate gas station food and did drugs.
There are realities to the lives that people experiencing homelessness deal with that are the result of our society choosing not to invest and making sure their lives are healthier or easier.
It's a resource allocation issue that our leaders don't seem to want to fix.
And for people like Alex, it's easier to blame the people who are struggling because to do anything else would require him to give up on his childish opposition to anything that sounds kind of like collectivism.
And then, I mean, if you think about it, what would his solution to tuberculosis among the people experiencing homelessness, what would the solution be?
I mean this sincerely, I can't think of a single Infowars employee who's gone on to bigger and better things.
Most of them just disappear into private life, like Leanne McAdoo or Jakari Jackson, but the ones who try to keep going don't typically follow the path of getting poached from Alex.
You had Joe Biggs, who Alex had to fire to save face about Pizzagate, who's now a high-profile member of the Proud Boys, which I would not consider an improvement.
There are people like Rob Jacobson or Josh Owens who've left and have since come out and talked about how full of shit Alex is and how awful it is to work there.
Millie Weaver got fired after she put out Shadowgate, which kind of insinuated that Roger Stone was involved with the players that were creating internet-based false flags.
Cousin Buckley is gone, but he's not a big media figure.
Jerome Corsi doesn't count, because he used to work for Infowars, but he worked for Newsmax before that.
He had a big career, and he's the swift boat and asshole before that.
And also, he hates Alex now and sued him.
I don't know.
There's nobody.
No one who's ever worked at InfoWars has been poached by anyone, because literally everyone in the media understands that InfoWars is a stupid organization, and that anyone who would decide to work there is completely unemployable.
This is a source known directly by individuals employed here that have worked in, let's just say, different stratas of the security apparatus of this country.
So Alex apparently learned about this a week ago, didn't talk about it on the show, now he's kicking himself because he's got another source that's told him, and he's like, ah, shit, I should have reported that last week, so then I can report it again now, or something.
You know, just give me copies of ballots whenever, you know, and commit a really serious federal crime when people are paying more attention than ever in the history of the world.
Look, I can understand Alex's desire to create fear in his audience and conspiracies about voting, but this one is a bit offensive and honestly kind of ageist.
Alex is trying to create the image that at these assisted living facilities the nefarious staff are stealing old folks ballots and presumably using them to vote for Biden.
Typically, this is not how any of this works.
According to a fact sheet released by Equip for Equality, in many cases, in-person absentee voting events will be organized at assisted living centers.
Quote, When this is done, your vote has to be collected by the election judge in order for it to be counted.
Anyone who's in assisted living can request an absentee ballot.
If you do that, you can return it in person, and then obviously you're handing it over to the voting authorities, or you can do it by mail.
However, if you get assistance in filling out that ballot, which you can from anybody who you decide is a qualified person to help you, quote, the person helping you must sign the envelope stating that they assisted you.
Failure to do so would be a huge problem.
Some states have laws that bar medical staff from assisting people with voting, and that does present a challenge since visitation is limited in nursing homes due to the coronavirus, but this is not an issue that no one is aware of.
What's going on here is that Alex is creating a conspiracy out of complaining about the wrong thing.
The real issue that should be addressed is how even without a virus in play, there are hurdles that affect voting access for people who are in assisted living.
There are laws that require access to voting, but...
These are not perfectly followed, and some folks do end up getting disenfranchised.
There's a definite problem that exists with ProPublica citing Medicare receiving complaints from 55 nursing homes between 2018 and 2019 where residents, quote, said they weren't given the opportunity to vote or were unable to get help casting a ballot.
This is real, and it affects real people who have a right to vote.
Alex wants to be the message to be that it's not fair for the elderly to vote if they vote Democrat, because that must mean that someone's manipulating them into voting that way, and the ultimate conclusion of his logic is that elderly people shouldn't have the right to vote because they're too impressionable or something.
If he wants to make that argument, he's welcome to, but I would love to see how he would try and pull that off.
As it stands, he's ignoring the real issue surrounding voting rights and assisted living while creating a fake version that benefits him politically.
It's the same thing as with the TB nonsense.
The answer is pretty clear when you consult people who understand the issues, but the answer is something that's incompatible with Alex's worldview.
Making progress in terms of TB and the unhoused population requires investment and resource commitment, which he's against.
Ensuring that everyone in assisted living has access to secure voting requires money, resources, probably some federal regulations, and Alex is against all of that.
His world has no solutions for these actual problems, but he knows how to profit from the continuing of them.
It sucks that making up terrible plans that would never work and getting people all scared of them will allow you to succeed at very good plans that have been in place to disenfranchise voters.
And they're just going to say he won, and they're going to go with the secession movement and have the media declare Biden the winner.
They'll say, well, it's not clear the 9-0.
It'll take a week or two.
And then they're going to say Biden wins.
And then when Trump contests it, they're going to say he's a liar.
And this is a disaster by design.
And during that, they're going to plunge the stock market saying, uncertainty about America.
Trump won't step down.
Stock market down 5,000 points.
7,000 points.
10,000 points.
12,000 points.
14,000 points.
20,000 points.
And it's going to be everybody lined up saying, get rid of Trump.
And Biden will turn the stock market back on.
And they're going to betray us during that period, and then they're going to kill the dollar, and then the average leftist won't remember they did this a month later.
For instance, no matter what, there's a very good chance that we will not know on election day who's won.
It's just the reality of how things work when there's such high levels of advance and absentee voting which can't be counted until Election Day in many states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which combine to represent 38 electoral votes.
Some states logistically could have difficulty having an accurate count by Tuesday evening, probably many of them, and that isn't suspicious.
Alex has made it suspicious, and by making the delay part of the globalists' plan, which makes no sense.
The next layer is the stock market.
It's very possible that the market could take a dip, regardless of who's in the lead during the period between the election and the certification of the results.
That stretch could be rocky because of the uncertainty it represents with investors not knowing which way to play things.
From some of the articles I've read, it feels like investors are really aware of this dynamic and many have hedged appropriately, so it's possible that the instability won't be nearly as severe as it could be, but there might be a dip.
This is a natural market reaction, but Alex has preemptively characterized this as the globalists tanking the stock market and holding it hostage, only to be let free if Biden is installed as president.
Of course, if there is a period of uncertainty and then Biden is declared the winner, that will have the stabilizing effect on the market, which Alex is trying to get his audience to experience as the globalists letting the market come back because they got their way.
The elements of this narrative that Alex is building are possible things, sensationalized quite a bit, 14,000.
There's a very good chance that there could be market instability at the end of this year, and it's likely that this instability could be worse the longer the election is undecided.
However, as Jessica Rabe, the co-founder of DataTrek Research, told CNBC, quote, The experience of this short-term volatility can be exploited by people like Alex if they're able to contextualize it ahead of time and then use being right about the prediction of that volatility to pretend to be right about the context they ascribe to it.
Put simply, Alex could be fairly accurate in his prediction that there might be market drops, although obviously not as big as he's saying, in the period when the election is undecided.
And then when the winner is named, things will settle down.
He could be completely right about that, and it would not prove at all that he was right about the globalists holding the stock market hostage in order to force Trump out and get Biden in.
That's just complete nonsense that he's imagining that he's going to give himself the appearance of being right about should the more basic...
Bill Gates said that it may take a decade to get back to the point we'd reached in terms of economic development in the developing world.
He wasn't saying that Alex would have to wear a mask for 10 years or even that the coronavirus pandemic will last close to that long, just that there are setbacks that have happened as the world responds to a crisis and that realistically could take a long time to get back to where we were.
Alex is just completely lying about what Bill Gates said.
As for this idea that there were studies showing masks spread disease...
In a very preliminary search, you can find a meta-analysis conducted back in May that found, quote, protective effects of wearing masks were significant in cluster-randomized trials and observational studies.
You can find a ton of studies that set out to see if there's an effectiveness difference between varying types of masks.
So if you want to make an argument that a cloth mask isn't as good as, like, a medical mask, maybe you could do that.
But I struggled to find the sort of thing that Alex seems to be talking about.
And though that webpage is damn near unnavigatable, I was able to find what I think he's talking about.
There was a study that was released back on September 11th that's getting some traction in the right-wing media right now, and there was a recent story on Breitbart that Alex has reposted on his website.
The headline is, quote, CDC study 85% of coronavirus patients reported wearing masks always or often.
Even if this isn't a misinterpretation of a study, it still isn't a bombshell.
As has been made clear over and over again, wearing a mask is less about protecting yourself and more about protecting those around you in the case that you are sick and possibly unaware.
The article on InfoWars is arguing against a straw man.
They're claiming that the study shows that masks are ineffective in stopping the wearer from getting sick, which is not the claim that anyone is making.
I don't think most people would be as offended by anti-mask people if wearing a mask was strictly about protecting oneself.
It's the part about how wearing a mask is to protect those around you that makes the whole...
Anyway, this study does show that you can catch the coronavirus, even if you wear a mask.
But that isn't a gotcha, so I decided to look closer at the study to see what else it said.
The finding of this study was that they were largely overlooked because what they said was just what you'd expect.
For instance, they found that, quote, close contact with one or more persons with known COVID-19 was reported by 42% of case patients compared with 14% of control participants.
They also found that case patients were more likely than control participants to have dined at a restaurant or gone to a bar in the previous two weeks.
These were the two main findings in their data, but the study itself makes clear that there are large limitations to the data they were able to gather, and that it might not be a perfectly representative sample of the larger population for a number of reasons.
This study in no way proves that wearing masks spreads disease, and if you're going to take anything from it, it should Those things seem like productive ways to interpret this information.
Less so.
Although, I do think that there is something to be said for wearing masks being possibly harmful if you don't wash them.
We get a licensing system for being allowed to say, this is what a study says.
You know, like, okay, so driver's license.
At 16, you also have to take a critical thinking skills test.
And you get licensed, but you have to wait until you're like 30. And you get licensed, and then you can talk about studies as if you know what they're talking about.
The whole perving on an underage girl thing to the point where Sacha Baron Cohen ran back in because he was like, I don't want to actually see a crime here.
He's saying that they told Rudy it was a break in the filming and that they needed to take the mic out, so when he was going into his pants, he was trying to take off his mic.
Alex is just choosing to ignore the part where the fake 15-year-old girl invites Rudy into the bedroom for a drink, and he comes in, and he's touching her.
I would argue that it's questionable to agree to an interview with a 15-year-old in a hotel room.
Why?
Just that decision alone is iffy.
Especially if you're Rudy Giuliani.
That choice is something that I think is dicey.
And then, to behave in the way that is shown, even before putting hand in pant, to behave in the way that it appeared that he was behaving is another level of...
And much like he creates a ton of URLs to try and keep traffic coming into his website, he also is creating new email addresses where people can send him information about how maybe they're breaking into or sneaking into nursing homes and finding ballots.
It's one thing to, like, if you have business to be at the center, like if you have a family member there, it's another thing to go on an investigative mission with your dog as cover.
Honestly, you guys would think that you are coming up with something that's so dumb, there's no way an info warrior would actually do it, and you are wrong.
I'm going to come in and do my last episode, and then it'll be there, and then when I go off air, whenever they come and get me, I'll have my last episode.
I was really hoping, we speculated that that would be the way he ends his show forever, saying that there was a secret last episode on his actual last episode.
God has given me a task in which I have not been obedient about, so this would be a good starting point.
More than a year ago, he gave me a vision in which told me that all who smoke hemp and seed shall surely die.
Ezekiel 3.18 says, when I say to a wicked person, you will surely die, and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade them from their evil ways in order to save their life.
Plans A through Z. Sometimes W. What if the plan to create a new Ice Age makes it so the environment is inhospitable to the super bioweapon that they've created?
None of these things are compatible or seem to complement each other, but they're all their plans.
The other thing that I come away with, too, is this weird sense of, like, I hate electoral Alex.
Yeah.
That's the feeling that I have had a really difficult time putting my finger on for a while.
Alex shouldn't care about electoral politics.
It's really unbecoming for him.
If he believes that there's a secret cabal of all this stuff and these globalists are all in control of so many blah blah blah, the right and the left, it's all an illusion.
He shouldn't care at all about votes.
The election shouldn't matter.
It should be like the Super Bowl to him or whatever.
It should just be like, this is just a bunch of bullshit.
With President Trump's devastation, devastation of Joe Biden, he has secured An even bigger landslide victory that I'm now just going to call it 10 days out.
Trump is going to win bigger than he won in 2016 in the Electoral College.
He might even win the popular vote, though that's the states where they've got so much election fraud going on.
But just as sure as the sun came up this morning and will set this evening, you can bet your bottom Benjamin Franklin or your bottom George Washington Or your bottom Thomas Jefferson.
You can bet your bottom Greenback that they're going to contest it and have the states start breaking up and just have the biggest fiasco you've ever seen.
They already said the last election was illegitimate.
And actually, I honestly think that it makes perfect sense that Alex would think that because, like, Trump was in the debate just, like, talking Infowars, man.
Let me give this analogy that's having sex with your mom, I guess.
Let's say you're five years old and there's this big mean motorcycle gang dude that weighs 400 pounds that beats your mom and beats you and there's nothing you can really do.
She's scared.
I mean, the Democratic Party is your mom, and the Chi-Coms are like the big thug.
And you've got the globalists that put the big thug in power, but that's really where this country is.
I'm not sure it's a winning strategy to say that carbon emissions aren't a big deal and your evidence is that every ten years we do as much damage as events that are pointed to as historical disasters.
Pompeii is a word that when you say it, people don't think about how that's the name of the city, and the volcano is actually Mount Vesuvius.
The word Pompeii is shorthand for that disaster, because it was so bad.
Krakatoa erupted in 1883, and these are still words that just mean volcano disaster because the effects of those events were so serious and left such an indelible impression on people's psyche.
Even if what Alex was saying were true, it would still be a strong argument for taking human carbon emissions and climate change seriously.
Does he think it's a convincing argument to say that we're pointlessly creating a Krakatoa?
That seems fucking stupid.
You know what else created more CO2 emissions than we do?
Now, to the larger point, Alex is just making up numbers.
These incredibly violent eruptions aren't happening all the time, whereas our actions are.
We may not have a Krakatoa-type volcano going off every year, but there are volcanoes, and according to Climate.gov, quote, Human activities emit 60 or more times the amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes each year.
Large violent eruptions may match the rate of human emissions for a few hours that they last, but they're too rare and fleeting to rival humanity's annual emissions.
In 2013, U.S. Geologic Survey scientist Terry Gerlach published a paper that estimated comparisons between the emissions caused by volcanoes and by humans.
His previous paper from 2011 had put the figure at humans releasing approximately 90 times as much as volcanoes, but this time the number was lower, partially because, quote, more data on carbon dioxide emissions from subsurface magma had become available in the years since.
Also, even that 90 times figure is probably quite conservative.
In his paper, Gerlach looked at particularly large events, like the eruption of Mount St. Helens, which he found, quote, released carbon dioxide on a scale similar to human output for about nine hours.
What Alex is saying is absolutely not true.
And even if it were true, it would be a really stupid argument.
Like, you think about it, and you, like, I mean, there's the effects, like, changing sunsets, and, like, those kinds of things that are, like, real visible and physical.
But some of them, like, they affect oral tradition throughout history that has gone down.
He knows that everyone's going to forget the 50 things he says and focus on his interpretation of the one thing that was close to what actually ends up happening.
I'm sure Alex would add the same response to Trump thinking that coyotes referred to the animal, like Trump did in a 2018 speech, saying, quote, without borders, we have the reign of chaos, crime, and believe it or not, coyotes.
Because of this very clear instance of Trump appearing to not know what coyote meant, when he used the word repeatedly in the most recent debate, people were most likely making fun of that, using the old reference as a jumping-off point, and Alex is pretending that's not part of the context.
Also, one of the reasons that people are up in arms and protesting as much as they are and have such a backlash and this conversation is happening so passionately is because when police shoot people, they do not typically end up getting arrested.
So, anyway, Alex, you're wrong.
You're stupid.
Everything is dumb.
I can't tell you how different this is from looking at the 2016.
It's just a completely...
When we went and looked at November 4th and 6th, 2016, there is demons.
All that stuff.
Everything is so fucking different.
It's all, I love Trump, I cried watching the debate.
As opposed to the first time around, it's all Hillary's evil.
It's very different and equally annoying.
I look forward to the election season kind of ending because, like I said, I do realize it's electoral politics does not mix with crazy conspiracists.
That's an easy thing for him to say, though, because everybody already knows that he could eat their goldfish, so they keep their goldfish away from him.