February 19, 2021’s Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ Texas power grid conspiracy—misrepresenting a DOE document to blame "globalists" while ignoring renewables and ERCOT’s state oversight—before exposing Joel Skousen’s absurd fossil fuel divine design claims. Jones’ rhetoric, from "kill lists" to mocking Ted Cruz, risks inciting violence under the guise of survival prep, while his reliance on fringe experts like Skousen undermines credibility. The episode reveals how conspiracy-driven narratives distort reality, leaving listeners trapped in performative outrage and unchecked fabrications. [Automatically generated summary]
He has a lot of breakdowns on this episode, and some will be fun to laugh at and discuss what he's lying about in order to get himself in the place where he can freak out.
Yeah.
But before we cover this episode, Jordan, let's take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up on our sporting show.
That's why we're in this position where there's a bunch of lawyers, a bunch of candy-ass lawyers covering their ass so much, the Chinese are running the tables on us.
Get ready to nuke our ass because you little chicken that America-hating bastards have taken over the damn country!
You know, I learned something during the Trump administration.
I had never tried to be in LA or be in New York or be in D.C. and to be around the power.
I had never tried to go be a sycophant and in the system.
But I noticed very early on they would work around the clock to try to make sure that I didn't have access to the president or access to anybody high-level government because I always just thought inform the public about things and then that would percolate up into government and into governance and then we would be able to stand up against tyranny.
You also need to target, obviously, people that are in a power structure.
And I'm almost tempted right now with the news I have that I've been working on the last hour to just not do the show today.
It probably would be better if I just call Tucker Carlson, call Steven Crowder, call Roger Stone, and try to get on the phone with Trump because I can get on the phone with him if I need to.
I would also argue continually starting the show with, my news is too big for me to do the show, is something too familiar for me not to be contemptuous about.
I mean, there's something weirdly noble about the tenacity he has because every other human being, I think, on the planet would at a certain point go, like, well, I've seen every other major news organization release huge information and then change the world.
And I think I've done that literally every day for my entire career, and not once have I changed the world.
The staff probably also is incompetent and not doing the job that he needs them to do.
But he's not that mad about what this big news is.
He's clearly still using this breakdown lashing out as a way of anybody who's watching, oh, they'll tell people that he's saying he's going to quit on air.
So also, it appears that Alex is very mad about a document from the Department of Energy that he's been shown.
And I would guess that he hasn't read this document.
He claims that it's smoke and gun evidence that the power outages in Texas were intentional, which is why he's putting on this shamefully childish display of fake rage at the start of the show.
We'll get into the document as Alex covers it.
But at this point, let me just sum things up to say that Alex is entirely wrong about it.
You know who goes down in history for being a hero?
People who weather adversity.
You know, when you think of Nelson Mandela and you think of being put in prison for all those years and then not just surviving through it, but then going on to help found a fucking country for a real opportunity and equality.
Before I went live on air, I got a bunch of extra news that I already was told by a very close person to me.
And I dropped the ball on Monday and just said, I've been told by inside sources in Texas power plants that the feds ordered them not to increase power.
I should have followed up on that.
I already knew there was those agreements.
I already knew about those documents.
I should have gotten the current ones.
I should have found out, well, let me see the directive.
Instead, I just went and poured another glass of wine and set the fire in the dark.
And then, son of a bitch, a whistleblower inside the Department of Energy contacted someone that works here and said, why is Jones not covering this?
No one else is.
And I read it 20 minutes before I went on air and already knew all that was real.
We went and checked.
It's on the Department of Energy website.
And it was like being punched in the chest and the stomach over and over again to read, for sure they raped us.
I'm not sure exactly what the definition of slimy documents are, but I guess for Alex, it's when the document says the opposite of what you need it to say.
And so you have to argue that when they say yes, they really mean no.
The document in question is titled Order No. 202-21-1.
It's four pages long, so there's no way I believe Alex read it.
And it's really easy to find.
And if you go do find it, what you'll read is an order that is designed to increase the electric capacity of the Texas power grid in order to deal with the emergency that the state is going through.
Sure.
On February 14th, quote, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, an independent system operator whose service territory includes 90% of the electric customers in the state of Texas, filed a request for emergency order under Section 202C of the Federal Power Act.
The beginning of the document lays out how ERCOT had foreseen the possible issue and that, quote, this weather event is expected to result in record winter electricity demand that will exceed even ERCOT's most extreme seasonal load forecasts.
To try to adjust for this, ERCOT attempted to maximize energy generation by doing things like having the Railroad Commission of Texas put out an emergency order that quote specified increasing the priority of gas supplies to ERCOT generators.
One of the main things that this order is about is that the electricity generation that they were needing to engage in would almost certainly not be possible, quote, without violating federal air quality or other permit limitations.
So ERCOT appealed to the Department of Energy to get an order allowing them to work outside those regulations due to the emergency situation.
On page two of the order, it says, quote, given the emergency nature of the expected load stress, the responsibility of ERCOT to ensure maximum reliability on its system and the ability of ERCOT to identify and dispatch generation necessary to meet the additional load, I have determined that the additional dispatch of the specified resources is necessary to best meet the emergency and serve the public interest for purposes of FPA Section 202C.
The order literally says, quote, ERCOT anticipates that this order may result in exceedance of emissions as well as wastewater release limits.
To minimize adverse environmental impacts, this order limits operation of dispatched units to the times and within the parameters determined by ERCOT for reliability purposes.
This is just an order where ERCOT asked for permission to wiggle around some regulation in order to be able to meet the increased demand of the energy emergency.
The Department of Energy replied that they could do so, but that wiggle room only existed for the purposes of re-establishing reliability of the power grid.
They couldn't just flout all federal pollution regulations, but some would be less rigidly enforced given the human need that existed.
Anyway, I don't think he's even read it, so I wouldn't expect him to understand some of these dynamics and all of this.
But I think that he realizes, like, I don't know if I can really even fucking explain this to the audience in a way that's going to make them motivated.
I can get more done if I call a bunch of influential people I know and tell them to look into this and let them break it because I don't care about breaking it and then it will actually have an effect.
Instead, the audience is great, but I say so much stuff, people just hear it and just think, oh, that's another thing Alex just said.
No, it's not.
It's the biggest freaking smoking gun I ever saw to quote Robert Duvall in network.
It's a big kidded hit, okay?
I mean, this thing would hurt them so freaking bad.
And then I sit there and I read exactly what I was told by my family that works in these damn plants that they're ordered to go at zero or quarter power under the freaking federal government because Biden put them back under the son of a bitch two weeks ago.
What if Ted Turner thinks we're working for him, but we're actually working for our own goals using his money and power that he thinks he's bought us with?
The relevant part of the order that Alex is talking about is as follows.
Quote, consistent with good utility practice, ERCOT shall exhaust all reasonably and practically available resources, including available imports, demand response, and identified behind-the-meter generation resources selected to minimize increase in emissions, to the extent that such resources provide support to maintain grid reliability prior to dispatching the specified resources.
This makes total sense.
And Alex is just writing a story about it to make things seem more nefarious, when in reality, this is very much a document that is the Department of Energy giving ERCOT a fair amount of leeway and trying to keep the system online.
Frequently in the document, you see it made clear that if the determination of what is necessary is that they need to put on more save lives now.
The power grid in Texas specifically exists in such a way as to not supply power to other states, to avoid interstate energy sales regulation from the federal government.
Someone with the pretend persona that Alex has should really understand that dynamic well and be proud of it.
Also, Alex is just reporting something Trump lied about and pretending it's real.
Trump basically lied in his State of the Union speech about how for the first time in 65 years, we're net exporters of energy, but that's not true.
Demand response is an energy efficiency strategy that involves giving customers the ability to adjust their electricity usage away from peak hours by doing things like offering cut rates at other times when the burden on the electric grid is lower or putting small tariffs on power during peak periods.
This Department of Energy document is saying that in addition to using available reserves, demand response strategies should be employed where possible to maintain the functioning of the power grid.
It would be easy for someone to hear me make this correction of Alex and say that I'm just nitpicking and fact-checking him pointlessly, but there's a really serious phenomenon that I'm trying to illustrate here.
Alex Jones constantly pretends to know things.
He has a consistent pattern of just making up definitions of words and details about news stories and then pretending that the thing he's making up is the product of research or investigation.
It's important to recognize that he does this about the small details of his day-to-day conspiracies in the same way he does with the larger worldview level conspiracies.
His workflow is essentially like watching a shitty improv show rooted in terrible racist politics.
He uses headlines and words he skims in stories as the suggestions from the audience that he takes and then he riffs a scene out of it.
I would implore anyone who takes him seriously to consider that dynamic and to critically engage with the things he's saying.
You'll almost always find him fabricating details about the stories that he's covering in order to make them fit his predetermined narrative and worldview, which he absolutely wouldn't need to do if he wasn't full of shit.
As for the skyrocketing prices of energy some consumers are seeing, that is being reported in reputable outlets and it does appear that some of this is going on.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas is opening an investigation into possible price gouging and I would guess that if they find companies that were engaging in that, then the customers will not be responsible for paying those outrageous rates.
There's one thing to keep in mind, however.
A small number of people in Texas use a company called Gritty to provide their electricity, which operates on wholesale prices.
Most people use providers who have fixed rates, but going through a company like Gritty actually saves people money on their electric bill generally.
The downside is in a situation like this, their rates are not fixed and they can skyrocket.
Even so, I would guess that these people won't be stuck with these exorbitant bills and the solution will be reached.
But the examples that you see are these really, really high bills.
And the ones that I've been able to see, and someone could correct me if I'm wrong, but the ones that I've been able to find being reported are wholesale prices, which are not the majority of electric users in the state of Texas.
Most people have fixed rate.
And obviously, their prices will go up too, but not per like the right.
Will need to use more electricity to heat their house because it's colder outside.
And all Ted Cruz has got to do to change the subject, all Greg Abbott has to do to redeem himself, all John Corner has to do is come out and read this on air and it's game over.
By the way, I've had my problems with Ted Cruz, but I think he's a good constitutionalist.
Cancun is like going out to get a cheeseburger in Texas.
It's an hour and 45-minute flight.
His daughters were going down there.
Why do I care if he flew down there with his daughters to get out of this hell when it turned out his power was off?
And I'm just reading it made me so angry that I almost turned this desk over.
Seriously, man, you know what?
That's a normal response to learning they're not just robbing our future.
They're blaming us.
They're starving people.
They're bankrupting all these communities.
They killed over 50 people.
And then now they're going to rape us more and are telling us permanent blackouts because the feds put ERCOT in control because you can't have the state managing it.
He seems to think it's like a power company as opposed to being the management entity for Texas's power grid, which is run by a board of directors that's overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the state's legislature.
The public utility commissioners responsible for overseeing ERCOT are directly appointed by Texas's governor.
There could almost be no system imaginable where the state would have more direct control over the power system, other than one where the state itself runs all the power plants itself, which I can't imagine Alex advocating for.
Alex knows nothing about the subjects he's covering, and he's just making up a story to tell the audience that fits the show's larger themes and narratives.
In the ERCOT region, that's Texas, the generating unit specified resources that this order pertains to are listed on the order 202-21-1 resource list as described below.
And it's, oh, hydroelectric.
And it's, oh, this, it takes them a week to turn a coal plant up.
These are all natural gas, lignite, bituminous coal or distillate fuel oil power generators, which are being given special permission to operate in ways that would exceed environmental rules, specifically only when doing so would be needed to maintain the reliability of the grid.
Alex hasn't read the actual document, nor has he seen this resource list.
He's literally just making up what he thinks the story is then, repeating that to his audience as a fact.
Yeah, also, this should make it more than abundantly clear.
We have an order saying that these evil power companies can destroy the earth in order to save lives, but all the renewable energies are just like, eh, you guys keep on going.
Like, it seems very obvious that one of these is a serious polluter destroying the world, and the other one, they're like, okay, well, you guys are fine.
We're going to come back and read all this for you.
It gets really bad right here.
It's really, really bad.
But the point is, the feds are in control.
The feds wouldn't let them up the power till the power grid was going down and then limited what they could do and then sat back and said, Texas is a bunch of idiots, a bunch of hayseeds.
But he can get his audience personally offended if he makes the whole thing about how the coastal elites think people in the middle of the country are stupid.
And that's pretty much the tactic that you see being employed here.
I do not appreciate that he is talking about a problem that is almost entirely the result of a state desiring more than anything else for the federal government to get out of their fucking business and then to blame the feds for being in their business.
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a piece of it that you can probably blame on the organizational structure of the disconnection from the interstate sales of energy.
But also, like, I think that you also have to be very careful with that because of how severe this storm is.
I'm just saying that if the reports of them being that close to having no power for months are true, that is 100%.
Look, there are going to be power outages.
They happen here, they happen everywhere, and it can be dealt with.
But if you have a system that is like, well, we were a James Bond moment away from fucking never having power for the next year, then yeah, you've done fucked up in the planning somewhere along the line.
I mean, at the very least, it would be hard to imagine if there was some sort of unified or greater area of power control where it wouldn't be able to be transported effectively much, much better to the point where we would have a better response time at the very least, you know?
Think it's a mistake that this operation comes out of Texas?
Think it's a mistake Kennedy got his head blown off down here?
People are ready to take action down here, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm not the feeling with Apple Kennedy.
I'm just saying the new world with a lot of fire.
And they take our kindness as weakness because they're stupid.
Because they have to tell you history and they have no idea about people dedicated to an idea, dedicated to their family, dedicated to God, dedicated to war to defend it if need be.
I live close to the Memorial City Mall right in the Houston suburbs, right in the thick of this whole thing.
And I can just want to say thank you to you guys because there is not a chance I would have gotten through this with myself, my wife, my three kids without two things.
First thing, the water filtration system is incredible.
Anybody listening, please, please get prepared.
You do not want to be a victim to this government, to this squeeze.
Thank InfoWars and Alex and this entire crew because every day you guys get uncomfortable and you have the uncomfortable conversation and you teach us here on the ground to be uncomfortable and to talk to people and to have the uncomfortable conversation.
And the reason why I love you so much so much, Alex, is because you're real.
You say when you make mistakes, you say when something got by you when the Q thing.
You just are real.
InfoWars is as real as it gets in America.
And I can tell you from listening to you guys from my generator power this week, you kept my connection to humans.
You kept my connection to God, Alex.
And I'm telling you, I have been freezing my butt off, me and my family, in 40-degree weather all week long.
But I can promise you, every morning when I wake up, I was going to band on video waiting for your reports because you guys keep our connection to God and our human connection.
But the idea that in a disaster, in this scenario that he's in, he goes to the generator to try and find Alex's videos to keep his connection with humanity and God is just dark.
You know, talk about how I'm a big leader of the military and all this.
I'm not.
I just, I can't sit there and lie to you and tell you that you're not being assaulted.
And so, like Santa Claus, you should be researching who's been naughty and who's been nice, who's going to get coal in their stocking and who's going to get little bicycle or toys or candy.
I would just say that it's time to write a sequel to Miracle on 34th Street, where Alex claims that Santa is making kill lists out of this naughty and nice list.
So, some of the places that retained power during the Texas storm seemed a little bit strange, but a lot of it's actually really easy to understand if you take the time to care.
A lot of it had to do with sections of the grid where essential services were located, like hospitals being a higher priority than ones that, say, didn't contain hospitals.
This could easily create the impression that there was power in downtown Austin, but not in outlying areas.
But if you look at the proximity of downtown to not only the Capitol building, but also Del Seton Medical Center, all kinds of warming centers, and St. David's Medical Center, you start to understand how it might be impossible to retain power to those buildings without also keeping power on for some 6th Street businesses that maybe you're like, why do they have a light?
And to be fair, I would guess a similar thing is going on in Oklahoma City, where the Thunder play at the Chesapeake Energy Arena, which is within walking distance of the county courthouse, the county detention center, and St. Anthony Hospital, as well as the entire University of Oklahoma Medical Center complex, including the Children's Hospital and the VA.
But when Alex is talking about how much this Bitcoin would be worth now, Max Keyser makes some kind of joke about like, ah, that's why you've got to sell these boner pills.
The evidence shows that it was federal mismanagement and control with ERCOT removing the state from the process that took one of our best power systems and made it one of our worst.
You know, the Lord in his creation actually put oil deposits.
Look, if fossil fuels exist, if you create oil from deteriorating animals and you look at all of the trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of oil, which would only represent a tiny fraction of the decaying bodies of any dinosaurs, you would have had to have dinosaurs 100 feet deep all over the entire earth.
Like, if you want to believe anything like that God put oil in the middle of the world, I think it's a harmless belief unless you're using that to argue against climate change.
There's just no way that these things could happen by chance.
This earth was a divine creation.
And, you know, most Christians believe in, and they should all believe, in the fact that the Lord has power over the elements, meaning the elements are intelligent enough to obey commands.
How could we have such a perfect environment, a perfect planet where massive weather events are occurring almost regularly due to our fault, where people are being destroyed over and over and over again by droughts because they get a perfect amount of water wherever they go on the planet.
I mostly bring this up and show this to be like, all right, Joel Skousen is somebody who Alex thinks is super credible, very important source on like geopolitics.
And, you know, he mellows out, says some bullshit, and then you get Skousen.
And I think that this illustrates two really essential points.
One is that Alex lies.
Like, this document, he's just making shit up about it.
It's just over and over again, finding little things that he can use as like, like, as if he's climbing up a mountain, little handholds that he can find to lie about.
And then the second thing I think this illustrates is that, like, people like Skousen are not reliable sources.
No, no.
So even if they have the pretense and the aura and the attempted facade of being like a serious-minded, I look at the documents and, you know, I go where I've read Carol Quigley's book and I am left to assume that all Democrats are evil or whatever the fuck.
Like, even if you put on that hat, underneath that hat is a dude who's weird.