Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Alex Jones’ May 8–9, 2003 episodes, where he falsely claimed NBC reporter David Bloom’s death was vaccine-related (7% of healthcare workers actually refused it) and sensationalized a drug raid with a tank. Jones misrepresented Dixie Chicks DJs as Clear Channel pawns, twisted a LA Times piece to defend McCarthy, and peddled "prison economy" conspiracies tied to Denver Airport’s artwork. His performative anti-communism, support for Putin (later abandoned), and calls for nonviolence—despite past extremism—reveal a reality constructed by oppositional rhetoric rather than principle. The episode underscores how Jones weaponizes misinformation to frame himself as a victim of "globalist" control while exploiting fringe audiences. [Automatically generated summary]
He hit his 12th home run, and he has an ERA around two.
And he has several.
I mean, this dude, here's why he's my bright spot.
Everything.
He is the only baseball player on this planet that has ever lived who can reliably throw a 100-mile-an-hour fastball and hit 450-foot dingers on the regular.
And I have thought about that, and here's why it's my bright spot, is because unlike so many other achievements...
Right now is the only time in history that anyone has ever done what Shohei Otani is doing.
And maybe he's the only person who has ever lived out of the 50 billion people estimated.
Which I'm a little confused by, but I'm excited to try to learn.
I was trying to learn a couple chords last night while I was playing around with it, and my fingers are too fat, so I don't know if it's going to work out.
Okay, there is a dog resting his, well, there's a puppy resting his very cute, very lovable face on top of a kitten who is staring cute and lovable as well.
admit how ironic it would be for Alex to constantly claim that the CIA and all important heads of state listen to him and yet we get very kind almost downright cute cards from the CIA letting us know that they are listening and that you are being too mean I apologize to the CIA, I guess?
Okay, we can't do this is a stolen news radio bit from four years prior to this show airing when Phil Hartman went on as Bill McNeil and did long interviews with himself as Bill Clinton.
First things first, Alex, not the last stat that he cited there, that's a little outlandish, but he's not off on some of this stuff, but the story that he's telling about this is missing some points.
I was able to find a CBS News article from May 2003, which discussed a proposed plan to vaccinate half a million healthcare workers against smallpox, of which, quote, only 35,000 of the targeted workers had been inoculated.
There's not good evidence that I can find that anyone was refusing the vaccine, just that the program may have only vaccinated about 7% of the stated goal population.
Sure.
So Alex is saying 99%.
are refusing the vaccine.
Right, right, right.
There's a real decent chance they weren't refusing it, but one in seven is closer than I'm used to him being.
And part of it is most people do not need to get vaccinated against smallpox nowadays.
The reason is because, thanks to vaccination efforts made by the people who came before us, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.
After 9-11, there was a concern about a terrorist But typically speaking...
Most people won't need that vaccine.
The people who do, according to the CDC, are typically lab workers who might be in contact with any viruses similar to smallpox.
The push to vaccinate in 2003 was based on fears of this potential terrorist attack.
And what was ultimately decided was that it wasn't worth the risk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The program was ended early, and only a total of about 39,000 people were ultimately vaccinated.
A large part of the resistance to this program was that people didn't buy that there was a real threat, since Bush had been pretty clear that there was no information of an imminent attack, and hospitals were reluctant to participate.
In the end, however, through this program's failure, public health preparedness was improved, and even critics of the smallpox campaign credited it with helping us be more ready for the later outbreak of SARS.
David Bloom was a 39-year-old combat reporter working with NBC.
He passed away on April 6, 2003 while on assignment, reporting from Iraq.
It's pretty well understood that the cause of death was that Bloom had developed a blood clot in his leg from spending days on end crammed into an armored vehicle and having deep vein thrombosis.
This clot made its way to his lungs and caused a pulmonary embolism, which resulted in his death.
In the days after he passed away, a doctor named Brian Strom made a number of comments to the media about the possibility that Bloom's death was related to the smallpox vaccination he'd gotten several weeks prior to his passing.
There's no direct evidence to support this conclusion, and Alex is kind of just making stuff up, riffing, and jumping to conclusions here.
That said, no medication is fully without some risk, and the smallpox vaccine is no exception.
Compared to the horror of having smallpox come back, though, the risk is very minimal.
It's just so indicative of how stupid people are that...
The government was like, okay, now, despite not having any idea whether or not they could have weaponized polio, or smallpox, would weaponize smallpox, or even have some way of delivering it, we're just going to go out of our way and protect ourselves against the possibility of a smallpox attack.
Despite the fact that...
The overwhelming number of humans have died of diseases that have occurred regularly, and at no point in time have they been like, let's put a lot of effort into preemptive...
And I think that maybe if you escalate in your head what the possible threat is, then the idea of a campaign of vaccinating healthcare workers who might be in the front lines or soldiers, that makes...
A certain amount of sense.
Looking back, we obviously have the gift of hindsight knowing that this didn't happen.
No, naturally, but it's just we've had too many examples of this type of paranoia being the excuse for action when it's paranoia that inherently devalues the life of other people as opposed to paranoia that's like, hey, diseases just come out of nowhere from shit all the time.
That's...
It's infinitely more important.
Instead, it's like, we've always got to be preparing for a war or an attack or someone to try and kill us.
Anyway, this clip I thought was a really good instance to illustrate why you can't take vaccine-related stories seriously when they come from Alex.
No matter what the reality of the story is, Alex is always going to take the story about the possibility of danger, and he's going to report that as definitive, and then he's going to...
Exaggerate it out.
And it's like, oh, it's been proven.
They've shown it.
And it's the same thing that he does with COVID-19 vaccine stories in the present day.
This behavior is consistent because he is staunchly opposed to vaccines.
And I think that if you are able to get yourself to a point where you recognize that, like, oh, he does do this over and over and over again, regardless of the circumstances, you have to start to ask yourself why.
The websites are InfoWars.com, InfoWars.net, and PrisonPlanet.com.
If the world doesn't make sense to you, if you wonder why you keep losing your liberties and...
More and more factories are shutting down, and while the borders are still wide open, as the government tells you to give up liberty for security, you'll find the answers right here.
You wonder why our government creates Saddam Hussein's, and creates Bin Laden's, and arms North Korea's, and engages the American people in these costly and dangerous wars, you'll find the answers right here.
You're wondering why police are running checkpoints and why there's cameras everywhere and why your children are being trained how to turn you in for owning guns when your guns aren't even illegal.
Is this part of God's plan for him in fighting the devil to lie to these people early on in his career so he can kind of like slowly trick them into being the holy warriors that God needs?
And like I've said in these 2003 episodes, one of the things that I'm trying to keep my eye on is this idea, does he think he's fighting the devil in 2003?
This headline that Alex is reading is not from a news story or any kind of journalistic source.
Yeah.
I can understand how this is still a source of information and it's entirely possible that a lawyer's press release could have stuff worth conveying, but it seems like something that shouldn't be treated as the same as an article in an actual news outlet.
Incidentally, this case resulted in the city of Eugene paying one couple $30,000 and another $92,000 to settle their cases, which claimed unreasonable search and seizure, excessive use of force, assault and false imprisonment.
The police contended that it was an instance of them having bad information and believing that they were raiding a drug house, whereas the couples believed that the police got a warrant by lying.
Whatever the case, it's not good policing, and even if the intel had all been good, seems like their actions would have been excessive for a drug raid.
Anyway, the point here is that in terms of the big picture, that this kind of police action is wrong, Alex and I are in complete agreement.
Question about the, I mean, as far as the fighting the devil in the past and the present goes, another question that that raises is, is this guy that guy, or does he change into this guy, and what does that mean?
You know, like, are there, is it possible?
That Alex and I could have had a conversation in 2003 that wouldn't have wound up with me trying to throw something into his face.
Let me just read part of this powerful article, and we're going to talk to the lawyer who wrote the story and got some of the other mainstream articles about it, Lauren Regan.
Eugene police illegally raid homes with tank prompts federal lawsuit.
And in the pre-dawn of October 17, 2002, approximately 50 police officers, I see this every day, You can hear the difference in his voice when he's editorializing.
And you know why that's a more compelling show than just reading the news, because this is very similar to how some asshole might be reading an article as he's reading it.
If I'm reading a dumb article, sometimes I'll read a sentence and be like...
These motherfuckers are stupid!
And then I'll read the next sentence.
You know, this is an engaging way of almost reading the news with your buddy.
This was a case from early 2002 where a 27-month-long investigation into an international gun and drug smuggling operation culminated in arrests in a town called Carthage in Missouri.
This is a real headline from an AP story, but the use of the words town searched isn't meant to be taken completely literally.
The multi-agency task force that was working on this extended operation set up some checkpoints to make sure the subjects of their investigation couldn't flee...
Again, I'm not justifying this policing necessarily.
I'm just saying that...
The image that Alex wants to create of cops kicking in every door in this town in Missouri, looking for wrongdoing to jam someone up, like, that's not accurate.
And how you bust somebody is you park down the street.
When the perp leaves in the morning, you do a little work.
You surveil them for a couple days.
When they go to work, you pull them over, you pull them out of the car, you take them back to the house with a warrant, you go in the house, nobody gets hurt.
But see, that's not fun to suit up at 3 a.m. in black uniforms and feel all tough and go rumbling down the road in your tank.
These are all wannabes who probably washed out in Special Forces.
Now they get to pick on women.
I mean, this show has a really abusive, psychotic nature to drag a naked woman outside with a black hood on.
And you don't know that Alex is going to be constantly trying to drive the image of a naked woman being dragged out of her house to his audience because that's visceral for them.
So, Alex saying that, you know, claiming that the globalists use that quote, perception is reality, that's interesting, because that's a quote most famously attributed to Republican strategist Lee Atwater.
Also, he's pretty notable that in 1984, he became a senior partner at Black Manafort Stone& Kelly, the consulting firm run by Alex's future good buddy, Roger Stone.
And I'm sad for our troops that are being used for the new world order and are being injected with deadly vaccines or being brought back here and turned into militarized police.
We need to remember what America is about.
What makes America America is because it was a free country.
Now we're beginning to lose that.
We're seeing the shift rapidly.
And patriots everywhere need to be veterans in the second American revolution, or I should say, restoration.
For all the veterans that really gave all, we've had requests for this song.
We'll air it, then I'll come back and talk to John Indiana, or John of Missouri, and others that are patiently holding, and I'll launch into a bunch of geopolitical, News and information.
So again, stay with us.
I think this song says it all.
It's not sappy.
A lot of people die to defend liberty.
That's what that flag symbolizes, is our republic, not a unit of a world empire.
I was accused of spamming people many times right after 9-11, the Iraqi war.
They leave their email addresses in the newspaper articles.
And one guy, he shifts his email address so he doesn't have to receive these because he knows that he would be guilty of misprision if he's alerted to the treason that's going on.
so so quick i want that what that man was talking about on the money this is on a program the other day one of the things with the money with the strip when you get it If you don't pass it on within a month, you'll be taxed on it.
Alex just misspoke there, and he tried to cover it by insinuating that the media had gotten this story wrong by making you think that the two DJs got in trouble for playing Dixie Chicks when maybe they got in trouble for criticizing them.
Only Alex can get to the bottom of it when he misspeaks.
It's a station that put in place a boycott on playing the Dixie Chicks songs after Natalie Maines had some comments at a concert that were seen as being anti-troop when she said that she was ashamed that President Bush was from the same state as her in Texas.
Obviously, this was an instance of everyone losing their damn mind and the right-wing shitheads doing a dogpile on the Dixie Chicks, but some of the...
Details of the story, particularly about this DJ situation, might not be what you remember.
So in terms of these actual two DJs, the story that I remembered was that they dared to play a couple songs from the Dixie Chicks, and that was enough to get them in trouble.
Sure.
An article from the Times Herald record has some other details.
Quote, "KKCS had instituted a ban on the Dixie Chicks, who at the time had two songs on the charts.
But two DJs at the station, Dave Moore and Jeff Singer, decided that two months was punishment enough.
They broke the ban.
At 6:15 a.m.
on Monday, May 5, 2003, they locked themselves in the DJ booth.
They started with "Long Time Gone" and they didn't stop playing Dixie Chicks tunes Was Adam Sandler and Brendan Fasier there?
Ultimately, what happened is that the station manager, Jerry Grant, gave the two a choice to either continue playing Dixie Chick songs and get fired, or stop, unlock the studio, and be suspended for a few days.
I have a huge problem with everything surrounding this story, but I'm not sure I disagree with these two TJs getting a slap on the wrist for essentially, like you said, living the movie airheads.
And so I wouldn't want them to be punished too harshly, but you can't lock yourself in a radio booth and pirate the transmission and expect nothing to happen.
And from some of the articles that I found, it seems like the Grant, the station manager guy, was like...
Yeah, we were getting ready to start playing their music again anyway, but we wanted to do it on our terms, and this wasn't the way we wanted to do it.
I don't like going into the past as much as you do because I find that his behavior is less egregious and thus makes me feel more like I'm saying stuff where I'm like, I mean, yeah, that's a good point.
What you're experiencing is exactly what lured a lot of people who wouldn't agree with Alex's radical politics into thinking he was more in the center than he actually is.
That means, in today's dialectic, that I am a ultra-communist.
Now, if you're a neocon who's an admitted Trotskyite, if you're a beatnik who has a national talk show, And who's an admitted communist, you are now a conservative.
And I'm not being sarcastic.
I am now a communist because I'm pro-America.
They, the communists, learned how to flap American flags in our face and talk about how conservative they are.
Right, and if you are an enemy of any part of the right wing, you will be called a communist, regardless of anything you may or may not have ever said or believe.
I think that there is a pretty key problem there, too.
And I do think that it's something that I notice about Alex, and that is the defining self by opposition or by others' response.
When he talks all the time about knowing that he's right because people are attacking him and stuff, it's like, that's not a reliable metric of, you know...
Due to a majority, if not all, of our listeners a couple of months ago saying they did not want to hear the Dixie Chicks on our radio station because of what Natalie Main said about our president over in London.
So it was starting to turn the other way.
Like, can you start to play the Chicks?
Yeah, we had requests for them and everything.
But we decided for our troops, 100%.
We're for the President, 100%.
But we're also for the First Amendment, 100%.
Should Natalie Maynes and the Dixie Chick said what she said?
That's what the military's for is defend our constitutional republic.
And just this whole blacklisting, this whole demonization of the Dixie Chicks over this has sent shockwaves across the country, a giant chilling effect, and America's going in the wrong direction here.
Your politics are such that I'm not going to play your songs.
But, like, I mean, if I was going to be impressed by these DJs having any interest in the First Amendment, then their actions would have probably come earlier.
One of the reasons that it was so nuts that everyone was piling on them in the right way is they were in the top three, top four country music acts in the world.
And now they have refuted twice in the span of about a minute.
Correct.
pillars of his conspiracy that Clear Channel is trying to boost their live ticket sales for one of the most popular acts in the world by pulling a stunt where they get kicked off Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You say that you guys supported then the takeover of Iraq.
unidentified
Well, you know, we support our troops.
And it's hard to say whether we're there because I don't know personally whether or not there are weapons of mass destruction and whether there's a necessity to do what is being done.
We understand that, but wouldn't you say it supports the troops, not to sell Saddam, VX, and Sarin, and then order our troops to blow up the bunkers, and then when they breathe that stuff in 91, to not give them treatment?
Because that's a big deal.
That really hurt the troops right there.
unidentified
Well, that's true.
Of course, we're just country DJs, and for us, it's about the music mainly.
Yeah, okay, so my position is that I support the troops, and your rebuttal to that is making me own literally everything the government has ever done?
Great.
How about I tell you that I'm a country, PJ, and we move the fuck along, because I'm not going to litigate every decision the government has ever made.
If you have been deflated so completely by these assholes, then there's also that little bit of Alex's Resentment coming out of like, you didn't give me what I want, so I will take it from you.
So I think that there's a little bit of a codependency with the audience, and this caller who calls in after the interview wants to make Alex feel better and try and help him with that Clear Channel conspiracy.
unidentified
First of all, the name of the promotions company is SFX Entertainment.
Yeah, I was going to say, on the list of, again, I believe we are at this moment fighting the literal devil who is destroying all of Iraq in order, in service of destroying all of the United States.
So, what Clear Channel's doing about the Dixie Chicks promotions?
I would say that I'd be willing to stipulate, and not accept as true, but I'll just go ahead and not even fight it, that Clear Channel, by virtue of Alive Nation, is doing ticketing for all of the Dixie Chicks.
It's not a dictatorship of Bill Clinton or George Bush.
They're just puppets.
It's a dictatorship of the military-industrial complex that was bankrolled and founded to run this country by the private European banks.
There's no fight between the EU and the UN in America.
It's all owned by the same private shareholders.
The Warburgs, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Dutch Role family, the British Role family, the Bilderberg group, the people that meet and publicly call for open world views.
People who are in the employ of the devil who has contacted them via trans-dimensional demons and offered them life extension technology if they carry out an elaborate and hyper-complicated plan to slowly and orderly kill off humanity.
Should they fail to do that, they have a backup plan to just release super bioweapons and kill everybody off.
It seems like this is a guy who wants to at least be taken seriously as a not science fiction writer.
Indeed, in fact, it seems like his biggest problem is ultimately what the end result of capitalism always seems to be, which is staggering wealth inequality leading to an aristocratic business class.
U.S. military leaders proposed in 62 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and ouster of communist leader Fidel Castro, who they put in.
No, they use the war against the communists as a way to warp the minds of our military men and our CIA and get them to do evil things and set up a culture of evil which is now used for narcotics trafficking and money laundering and white slavery.
Now, Alex, he plays a song and then he comes back from break and he's like, yeah, you know, we're in Texas and the satellite's in Minnesota, so sometimes, you know, there's problems.
Continuing with the news, despite McCarthy, Red Peril really was.
John Maroney, LA Times.
And it goes on, it says the document shouldn't be allowed to undermine the important historical fact that Soviet communism was a very real threat to U.S. defense and freedom.
The anti-communist fight, Wade's in the country, was a moral one.
Even though the Communist Party succeeded in seducing an estimated 280,000 Americans to its ranks over the course of 40 years, it now says that the documents released show that McCarthy was right.
This article from the LA Times is an opinion piece, and Alex is actually lying about the main thrust of the article.
The author John Maroney is arguing that there was a point to opposing communism during the Cold War, but the actions of people like Joseph McCarthy gave that opposition a really bad name.
Because McCarthy was an opportunist, fraud, and demagogue.
Even in that sentence, Alex reads the words, quote, the documents shouldn't be allowed to undermine the important historical fact that the Soviet communism was a very real threat.
Aren't his listeners curious why this article is arguing that documents would possibly undermine that notion if this article is about vindicating McCarthy?
Those things are in this, the headline and everything because these documents that got released in 2003 were a record of secret hearings that McCarthy held with witnesses prior Yeah, yeah.
from an article about the documents from the bbc quote many had only tenuous connections with communists through family members or book clubs where marx was read or unions with left-wing leaders the new documents paint a picture of a senator out of control summoning witnesses at short notice and browbeating them with the threat of imprisonment or public disgrace But it was noticeable that those he could not intimidate in private were often not called in public session.
Like that last sentence there, the people that wouldn't back down to him typically weren't called for the public once, because that doesn't create the public perception that he's looking to grandstand with.
Also from the article, quote, According to Senate historian David Ritchie, the private hearings were more of an inquisition, using circumstantial evidence, hearsay, and intimidation to force people to acknowledge his point of view.
The documents that came out in 2003 paint Joseph McCarthy as an out-of-control lunatic trying to run a witch hunt.
And this LA Times editorial is an attempt to remind readers that just because McCarthy really sucked, that doesn't mean that Soviet communism didn't exist.
If you were really someone who was opposed to communism and you'd read this article, you couldn't come away from it honestly with the position that it vindicated McCarthy.
The article literally says, quote, According to Maroney, McCarthy is a detriment to the opposition of communism.
Essentially, the only two conclusions I can come to about Alex's coverage of this article are the following.
One, he didn't read the article, and he thinks it actually says that McCarthy was totally cool, and he's just making up what the body of the text says.
Two, defending McCarthyism and the tactics of witch hunting is more important to Alex than actually being opposed to communism, which makes his anti-communism essentially tactical, as opposed to something that's based on principle.
I get the sense that he would not be so opposed to communism if his route to do it was to be an economics professor or a researcher who got no fanfare and didn't get to do these bombastic public hearings like McCarthy, which is Alex's radio show.
If he wasn't able to make a show out of it, I don't know if he would be as interested.
So, Alex takes another call, and this guy has a decent point, and Alex has a terrible answer to it, and that is, why are we even talking about the assault weapons ban?
I've reflected on some things over the last 24 hours, and there's several different points.
First off, something dawned upon me.
Why is the administration dealing with the assault weapons ban 15 months before the issue even comes due in the middle of this climate with so many concerns about the war and so forth?
Why even deal with that out of the blue so far in advance?
So he tends to agree that there's probably going to be a shooting at the second Matrix opening, or second Matrix movie, because it's going to be a trigger, and then they're talking about the assault weapons ban stuff so they can be right in advance for this thing that didn't happen.
The vibe that I get from Norm from those early appearances is either, like, someone who legitimately doesn't really understand what Alex does, or somebody who really, really wants people to think he doesn't understand.
It just sounds like we're in, we're like a TV show in our eighth season and we start doing all the flashbacks and it turns out our main characters all coincidentally met 20 years ago.
In Boston Logan Airport and four other airports they put NASA brain scanners in to quote...
Hell if you're agitated.
In 1984, they didn't scan your brain.
This is total information awareness.
Worse than 1984.
Then they say, oh, but it's to keep you safe.
It's to keep you safe, America.
We just want to keep you safe.
But the borders stay wide open, and they're putting the Ba 'athists back in power in Iraq because they're good thugs trained by the CIA in the 70s and 80s.
I know this is getting repetitive in these 2003 episodes, but I'm really, really interested in what's going to happen when debathification comes around.
Because he's hitting this note so consistently.
On every show, he's bringing up how the bathists are in charge, and it's because that's who the U.S. government and the globalists want to be in charge.
INS Kentucky poured concrete for two years under a giant underground old coal mine and built a supermax on top of it with airfields and everything.
They're building giant prisons everywhere.
It's the new economy.
A giant prison economy where they literally own us.
Where torture is the order of the day and is a virtue.
unidentified
That's very interesting, because down here in Trinidad, we're having seismographic readings, and in Trinidad was the site of an old Japanese internment camp, and it has old mines, but they're getting seismographic readings, but there's no faults there, and so I'm going to collect as much hardware as I can.
Sir, your Denver International Airport has pictures of Nazis machine-gunning piles of dead bodies, satanic art everywhere, a giant FEMA camp on it publicly.
The prison pipeline or the prison industrial complex is going to eventually become what it is.
Like, he's right on about the prison complex.
And then to hear the crazier conspiracy theory from his caller.
Like, that weirds me out.
We're living in a complete topsy-turvy world because normally, nowadays, he would come out with something like, you know, the devil's killing everybody and they're like...
Yeah, but maybe the devil is just trying to raise the corporate tax rate.
Like, you know, it's a very weird inversion of the way this goes.
I wanted to, because I wasn't sure I heard what I heard from Curtis.
No, it wasn't Curtis.
Curtis is coming up.
I was talking to Omar last segment from Michigan, and so I did hear what I thought I heard.
My audio was low.
Omar, let me explain something to you.
I'm sure you're a nice person and mean well, and I appreciate your hard work, and you say you're waking folks up, but look, I've tried to make this clear, and this is what I truly believe and know, and I know what I'm talking about.
I work on this probably harder than anybody else.
Fighting the New World Order, defending my family, standing against crime, standing against evil.
Have you not learned what I've said here, what history shows?
The globalists carry out violent acts against their own institutions as a way to legitimize power and control and domination and the destruction of liberty.
I mean, it's still, like, obviously this broadcast is still incredibly irresponsible.
But there is a complete world of difference between...
Taking a step back to calmly and emphatically stress that there's no violence.
Violence is no good.
It's not the answer.
And Alex's long pornographic rants about slitting people's throats and talking about how all the globalists are already dead and all this in the present day.
And I think that maybe the fact that that wasn't something he could build on at all, and he's just going to have to pretend that interview never happened.
Yeah, I mean, I think to a certain extent, when you think about a lie, you do think about somebody with malicious intent or, at the very least, desire to hide information or something like that.
And to me, what I'm seeing from all of this totality now is just a man who just doesn't give a fuck if it's true or not or whatever.
He's not lying.
He just doesn't care.
You know?
He's just beyond lying or not lying.
He's just making up his own reality that he exists in from a moment-to-moment point of view.
And, I mean, this doesn't prove that he never talks about any of this stuff, but a lot of the themes that you would think might have been important are not important.