Today, Dan and Jordan check in on the past. In this installment, Alex reveals that some of his more sensible-sounding positions are actually dumb, interviews a guy his audience clearly hates, and gets a call from a guy who recently lost a tiger. Citations
And I'm very excited about a couple of things that happened that have nothing to do with how important, like these important stories from 2003, nothing to do with them.
He's got a birthday, but instead of wishing a happy birthday to himself, he wanted to spread this to all the community of wonks and wish everyone else in the world, I guess, even if it's not your birthday, have the good feelings of someone wishing you a happy birthday.
I know, but it's funny that we're in the present day on our last episode talking about how there's no way for your next generation to grow into adults and then we go back in time and they're still...
I believe that a serial killer or whatever should be executed.
I mean, that's an eye for an eye.
That makes sense.
It's something that needs to be done.
But you have the big criminals running the government.
How can you trust them to mete out the death penalty?
So death penalty moratorium considered in North Carolina, a blue-collar town known for its furniture factories, law and order conservatism, hardly seems the kind of place that would call for a moratorium on the death penalty.
But people don't trust the government.
So how can you trust the government to hand out the death sentences?
I mean, certainly you're for the death penalty, most of you.
So am I. But in Soviet Russia, would you be for Stalin handing out death sentences?
Up till this point, I'd gathered from context clues that he didn't support the policy, given that many of his other ideas that appear to be based on principles have to do with the government not doing things to individuals.
Still other positions can be based on ethics, where there's an intrinsic moral character to sentencing someone to death, and that consideration guides your position.
And then there are sets of political beliefs that could include a strong position regarding the relationship between the individual and the state, which would impact your views on the death penalty in obvious ways.
Alex seems to only be operating on the most elementary level here.
He's appealing to an emotional desire for an eye to be taken for an eye.
This is really unimpressive stuff from him, and I once again regret that I gave him more credit than he deserves in terms of this position.
The other cowardly thing Alex is doing here is that he's claiming that he's for the death penalty, but not when the government is corrupt.
The level of corruptness of the government is a completely arbitrary and subjective measurement for Alex, so this actually means nothing.
According to his feelings, the George W. Bush government, and obviously the Clinton one before it, they are too corrupt to responsibly hand out death sentences.
but it would be impossible to formalize this into any meaningful scale that you could judge things on.
Literally anyone could just counter his argument by saying that they believe that the Bush administration was not too corrupt to hand out death sentences, and Alex would have nowhere to go.
He could rattle off instances of governmental corruption to try and build to a point, but that still doesn't handle the subjectivity of his assessment of which government is or isn't too corrupt to sentence people to die.
I thought it was more of a blanket, like, you wouldn't trust the government to do that just because there's a good chance they are corrupt in some fashion or another, because they always have been.
By presenting his position this way, Alex is effectively making it seem like he's taking a position when he's actually not.
He's in favor of the death penalty, but only when it comes to some imaginary ideal government that could be in place.
By planting his flag there, he can manage to not alienate either side of the debate while getting each to think that he's actually on their side, which is a bit weaselly.
There's an additional problem here, too, and that's that there's no reason why the logic Alex is using should apply exclusively to punishments involving the death penalty.
If your opposition to the state imposing a death penalty has to do with the state being too corrupt to responsibly give out that sentence, then it should stand to reason that they're also too corrupt to responsibly incarcerate somebody.
The reasoning that Alex is using is that the state is too corrupt to responsibly incarcerate somebody.
And the way he's presenting it, I understand where you're coming from.
And I actually think that it does get closer to what the point should be.
You're saying that by the very nature of it, the government is too corrupt to...
I always thought there would be a blanket opposition to the death penalty from Alex because of the relationship between individual and state that is implied through all of his...
And I was surprised when he says that he's for the death penalty.
That is not how I've heard Alex explain his opposition to drug laws at other points in his career that I've listened to.
Every other time I've heard this discussed, the issue is that Alex is not in favor of drugs, but you have the right to take whatever you want.
It was literally one of the main selling points of Ron Paul to people on the left, and one of the major tools Alex tried to use to insist that he wasn't a right-winger.
His opposition to drug laws is purely a consideration of trying to break up the cartel of globalists who he believes ship in all the drugs.
Legalization is in essence a strategic move against the globalists, not something that Alex supports because of the political belief that adults should be able to use drugs if they want to, which is the way that he presents it pretty regularly.
This is super weird, man.
I'm like five minutes into this episode and already Alex has explained two of his positions on things that I thought he was pretty rational about and shown that his positions are all wrong.
I'm starting to question if there are any positions that he and I would agree on.
I hold out that last bit of hope that somehow the conversation about civil asset forfeiture won't somehow turn out to be his position on that is based in some kind of alien fear or something.
So, like I was saying, about the execution thing, the death penalty, Alex talks a little bit more about his feelings, and this is where it kind of gets into, like, alright.
I can kind of see what you're saying, but it's still incredibly stupid.
Here's an interesting statistic that I'd like Alex to chew on.
Maybe you know the answer to this.
I'm not sure if you do.
How many people were executed by the federal government during the eight years that Obama was in office?
Do you know that?
Yup, zero.
From 1958 to 2001, only four people were executed by the federal government, one of whom was Timothy McVeigh.
Three of these came during George W. Bush's presidency, but none after March 2003, so at the point when Alex is complaining about federal executions, he's talking about something that won't happen again for over 17 years.
And then Trump became president, and 13 people were executed by the federal government, and I don't think I ever heard Alex bring it up as a problem.
And the fact that it wasn't a major breaking point for Alex, if this is actually what his position is rooted in, that, oh, it should only be states doing it.
It doesn't, that idea of the different, that federal government shouldn't be able to, but state government should, that's so stupid, I can't even breathe.
So, there have been few federal executions for Trump for many years.
But conversely, according to analysis from USA Facts, between 1977 and 2018, there were 1,490 executions carried out.
...
particularly Texas, carry out the vast majority of executions.
And Alex is saying that he's fine with that, which makes absolutely no sense based on what he's pretending to base his positions on earlier.
If he doesn't believe the federal government should be able to sentence people to death because the government can be corrupt, it's absolutely idiotic to pretend that the same concern doesn't exist in slightly lower levels of governmental organization.
Being opposed to the death penalty, but only on the federal level, is the very definition of a meaningless position.
It only becomes more meaningless when you explicitly support state executions and you live in Texas, the state with the government that seems most interested in killing convicts.
It's a downright farce when you also go on to support Donald Trump, the president who presided over 13 federal executions, a total reached in four years that surpasses the number of federal executions that have been carried out for the preceding 67 years combined.
My point is that Alex's political beliefs are idiotic and they're not based on anything.
But, at very least, this kind of brings things into focus.
You know, at least you can kind of get a sense, because he's given us this little piece of information, it's just a states' rights kind of argument that doesn't have anything to do with ethics, morality, or even opposition or support for the death penalty.
If you want to abolish the death penalty in Texas, in Alex's eyes, what it should do is secede, then it will be its own federal government and will no longer be able to perform executions.
He just hates the federal government so much that he's willing to accept how many probably innocent people are being killed in the state of Texas by the government.
One of the things that I find most remarkable about it is that I could have listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of Alex's show and still have this be, oh, I had the baseline position that you had wrong.
I had way too generous of an assumption.
Because I've heard him talk about not being in favor of the death penalty.
I just didn't realize that maybe it was rooted in something that's really stupid.
Yeah, the only way to carry out the death penalty in Alex's eyes is if there is a, I suppose, philosopher king who's choosing each and every individual person based upon God's orders.
Yeah, I mean, like, if his ideas were correct about how the globalists operate and their level of control over everything, that's exactly what would have happened, because he's writing that novel.
So I think that these two things, if you were to listen to this episode, one of the things you would definitely take away from it is that this position on drugs and this position on the death penalty...
Are things that Alex really wants to take calls about.
I think it's a slow news day for him.
I think he's trying to solicit calls.
Now, at the same time, I don't know if I can get a sense that these are fictional versions of his positions.
Like, I don't think he's saying these things to try and antagonize people like someone might on a shitty call-in talk show.
I agree with you that cocaine, heroin, crack, methamphetamines, I do agree with you that all those drugs are bad.
And all those drugs that you'll notice are synthetically made by humans.
Now, marijuana, I don't consider to be personally a drug.
And I think that's very important for people to understand that a lot of the drug laws, as they were put down at time past, were not really made to stop the drugs.
You know, these drugs were illegalized because of, and then the answer to that was going to be criminalizing underrepresented groups in government, especially racism in Portland.
But he also, this caller, brings up the death penalty and Alex's position on it.
And this caller has an interesting reason to be against the death penalty.
He's coming from a utilitarian perspective.
He believes that the death penalty is not a deterrent.
unidentified
I want to say, I guess another point, I see myself being against the death penalty just because of the fact that I really don't see it as a detractor from violence.
I mean, from the moment he said those words, there were literally zero federal executions until his chosen god-king Trump came into office and started wantonly killing people.
Also, consistently, research has shown that there's no discernible deterrent effect in having a death penalty.
Statistically, violent crime and murder rates are lower in states that do not have death penalties, and a 2018 study reported on Death Penalty Info found that countries...
The study looked at murder rates for 10 years after 11 countries got rid of capital punishment, and they found that six of them had lower rates all 10 years.
Four had one or two years above the baseline and then saw a downward trend underneath the previous level.
Only the country of Georgia had a higher murder rate after, and explaining exactly why that might be the case is beyond me or this study.
Anyway, the point here is that no credible data that would back up Alex's conjecture that the death penalty is a good deterrent for crime exists.
It feels like it would be, since you'd think that people would be less likely to commit crimes if they knew they might get killed for them, but that feeling is not based in reality.
According to the CDC's numbers, the states with the three highest death rates from homicide in 2019 were Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.
All three of these states have active death penalties.
This shouldn't be the case if what Alex is saying is true, but it's not because he's not living in the real world.
Appealing to emotion of, like, I think that this person deserves to die because they committed this crime is...
It is not a well-thought-through position, and obviously, people's feelings are different about different crimes, and you'd get yourself in a lot of trouble if everything was organized that way.
That does seem to be what Alex is basing it on.
This caller has a slightly more evolved position than Alex, and Alex is telling them that they're wrong.
Yeah, no, I mean, it is that kind of feedback loop of, yes, it is the most base...
The most base form of reasoning is that appeal to an emotion of, this person did bad, bad happens to this person now.
And that's why so many prosecutors and elected attorney positions are fucking running on those, like, look at how tough and look at how cruel I have been.
Because that appeals to that emotional base, and it's...
Law and order.
Yeah, it's how we get to where we are, is they can exploit the lowest form of reasoning to only enact worse.
Yeah, because I think that the other thing, too, that is part and parcel with that is that the appeal to that emotion of this person deserves this because they did this crime is also an appeal to, like, your feelings of security and stability.
Because if you're the person who's hearing a politician be like, I'm tough on crime, really how it hits you and how you experience it isn't so much about, like, they deserve this.
It's...
I get the feeling that I will be safe from crime because this person is taking care of those things.
You know, America is the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, yet we still engage in barbarity and savagery.
You know, like, I figure that you should take the criminals, once it's been proven that they're criminals, they're the communities, vile acts or whatever, put them on an island with their own kind.
And I certainly think that if someone is convicted, take these people and put them on an island, put the violent offenders together, let them enjoy their own type, their own type of hate.
I think we should send all of our criminals around the world to one island, perhaps a continent even, a big island, huge island, just send them all there, and I'm sure it'll never come back.
See, I feel like that clip is a really good tell that Alex isn't coming in with any real position that has an application in the real world, because in the modern day, the idea of creating a penal colony is stupid.
If he just wants people to call in and discuss how they'd like to punish criminals, I guess that's fine, but it is not a productive use of time.
It does seem like everybody's having a little bit of a fantasy, like, here's how I would punish criminals.
All right, now you think the death penalty's a good idea.
What I would do is I would fill their room with cupcakes and then cover their hands in plastic bags and open their mouths real wide and they would eat one cupcake every day.
This caller does not have an idea that that is quite as innovative as your approach to criminal justice, but this one would not.
unidentified
I think the state should only have the power of death, and I think it's like no quarter, no half measures.
If somebody's vile and wicked enough...
Then you have to put them to death.
When you put them in prison, all that does is create a situation where, oh, that's merciful, it's okay to put somebody in prison because they walked on the grass.
I, too, feel like there are too many people in prison, but I strongly disagree with this entire conversation.
This is an unhinged position that would not stand up to the smallest amount of scrutiny.
So, if I were talking to this guy as a guy who was, like, hosting a radio show where you're taking calls on a subject, I have a couple questions that I would start off with.
From what I can tell, the details of it are that there were some police that showed up at her house.
Because she has some acres of land, and there's maybe something suspicious going on on some of the acres of the land that she allows other people to use, and they wanted to look into what was going on, and so she let them in, and they said, thank you for letting us look around, and this is a giant conspiracy of some sort.
And there's not really a good sense that she has an idea of what's going on.
Sure, sure.
Some law enforcement showed up and wanted to look around, like I said, because they had reason to believe there was something suspicious there.
They didn't find anything, and they thanked her for cooperation, and now we've done this.
I fully understand standing up for your rights, and if this lady had chosen to let the police look around or told them to come back with a warrant, I think either is an appropriate choice to make in her situation.
It's one thing to be mindful of your rights and protect them.
It's another thing to do what Alex is doing, where he's trying to take some very benign details this caller is giving him and escalate the story into hospitals keeping track of when you're alone so they can kidnap your kids.
This is a sick person acting out at his audience, even back in 2003.
You see a bit less of this at this point in his career, but it's pretty clear that this behavior is still part of Alex's psyche, even back at this point.
Yeah, I want you to make 100 copies, and I want you to tell the neighbors that story and say, we need you to make 100 copies, and for them to make 100 copies, let's have 10,000 copies of my video in that area so people know what they're dealing with.
That's good old-fashioned religion is what that is right there.
That's somebody telling you a story and you listening to them and you being part of them and you giving them the spirit of God and then at the end of it, my friend, what you need to do is...
And they have an insane deal where I told you a pallet fell over a couple days ago.
A few of them got broke.
Most of them got a few scratches.
Those that have any real damage are being thrown away.
Instead of $199 for the two-filter Black Berkey clear filter that does dozens of gallons a day, tens of thousands of gallons in its lifetime, only $149, $50 for the scratch and dent sale.
And a lot of these don't even have a scratch on them.
So, this next clip gets into something that's, I think, a little bit murky, and there's a lot of, there's probably a good bit of explanation that I need to, a lot of track on this one.
I heard Joyce Riley talking about the report out of Brazil yesterday, so I went and got the actual document.
We're posting it on Infowars.com right now.
Of course, this has been out for years, but I think it's important to remind people of it.
She reminded me when I heard her show yesterday morning.
And I have the actual report put out by the National Security Agency and the CIA, Population and National Security, 30-page report where Dr. Kissinger and others talk about exterminating half of the Third World's population through birth control.
Forced sterilization, and it's been going on since the mid-70s.
Tens of billions of dollars of your tax money to do it.
And, my friends, it's just amazing.
Here's the headline.
Brazil launches inquiry into U.S. population activities.
Billions sterilized to meet U.S. policy objectives.
A U.S.-sponsored program that resulted in the sterilization of nearly half of Brazil's women has prompted a formal congressional inquiry sponsored by more than 165 legislators from every political party that is represented in the Brazilian legislature.
The investigation has ignited after information about a secret U.S. National Security Council memorandum on American population control objectives in developing countries was published in the Journal of Brazil.
And other major newspapers in early May.
Now, again, this goes back to the early 90s.
We have the 30-page report directly off the Library of Congress.
Yeah, and you would say, like, oh, maybe he only read 30 pages of it, but he didn't read two pages of the 30 pages that he didn't read of the 124 pages.
And we've talked about it in the past, particularly in the endgame coverage and stuff.
But to give a brief recap of it...
This is not a plan to sterilize the world.
That's a fake version of this document that Alex has imagined because it's really about providing foreign aid in the form of healthcare and reproductive assistance to people in less developed countries, and Alex is super against that.
He's smart enough to know that he would look like an asshole if he spent his time passionately yelling about how evil it is to provide healthcare to people in developing countries, so what he does is attack the policies and proposals to do just that by pretending that they're actually plans to kill everyone, and he's a hero for telling you about the evil.
If you actually go read NSSM 200 after having only heard Alex yell about it, one of the things you'll be surprised by is how much of the document is not about providing reproductive options to people in the developing world at all.
In reality, it's about the implications of the post-World War II population growth that's been seen around the world and how it could impact the general stability of the world, mostly as seen through the prism of U.S. interests.
The document places equal importance on programs aimed at, quote, The word sterilization is used two times in the document in the same paragraph when it's listed as one of the short-term options that are available to provide improved fertility control for
people in the developing world.
There's a list of options like oral contraception, IUD, and even teaching ovulation prediction and the rhythm method.
And sterilization in this context that it's being used is things like tubal ligation or vasectomies.
So, that's the thing.
Sterilization is a word that's a bit loaded.
On the one hand, coerced or pressured sterilization is definitely hugely unethical and unacceptable, and there is a history of it in the world, and I'm not minimizing that.
On the other hand, there's a long and widespread history of people using voluntary sterilization as a method of birth control, and Brazil is a place with an interesting history on that front.
There's a much larger picture here and a bigger story to unpack than what Alex is doing.
He's pitching a made-up version of this document from the 70s, combining it with a recent headline he's read from Brazil and declaring his work done.
In reality, he's done nothing and he's covering up what's actually going on under the surface.
The actual news headline here that he has is about an investigation in Brazil into the history of sterilizations, which was said to have been prompted by reports about NSSM 200 in Brazilian outlets.
Instead of talking about the details of Brazilian sterilizations and what this actual news story is about, Alex just rattles off his normal talking points about the memo and he pats himself on the back.
That was unsatisfying for me as a listener, so I decided to look a little bit deeper into the subject.
For a little background on the situation that Alex is covering, it's important to understand the roots of family planning history in Brazil.
As discussed by Jose Alves, professor of the National School of Statistical Sciences at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, titled, quote, The Context of Family Planning in Brazil, from the early days, there was a moratorium on any sort of birth control.
Federal decree 2029-1 from 1932, quote, established that doctors are forbidden from indulging in any practice whose aim is to prevent contraception or terminate gestation.
In 1941, a law was passed making it a crime to even advertise processes or substances that would be meant to encourage reproductive choice.
As you could probably imagine, this didn't stop the public demand for birth control options, and beginning in 1965, a group called Family Wellbeing Civil Society started providing some family planning services.
Though they were unable to meet demand, and even if they could, the ability to provide things like oral contraception was nearly impossible in the context of Brazil's laws.
The country was playing from behind.
And it didn't help that in 1964, Brazil was the locale of a US-supported coup that led to the installation of a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985.
Over the course of that period, opinions began to soften on family planning, with it becoming seen more as a matter of individual rights and health decision-making.
By the time that the real progress was being made on the issue of reproductive rights, there were already a ton of people in Brazil who had opted for sterilization as a means of birth control.
And many of them were women who already had kids and didn't want more.
And that predates the NSSM 200 memo that Alex is talking about.
One of the primary drivers I've been able to find identified as contributing to a high number of sterilizations in the country has to do with the period just after the end of the military dictatorship.
As the country went through the process of democratization, one of the moves that was made was to decentralize the medical system so there would be more local control and responsibility for the providing of healthcare to the public.
This was a decision that cut in two directions, particularly in higher poverty, less developed areas of the country.
As explained in an article from the journal Population and Development Review from March 2004, While efforts to improve and decentralize the administration of the public health care system undoubtedly led to progress in a number of larger municipalities, it is possible that decentralization actually fueled clientelism in smaller and poorer municipalities by providing an additional source of assets to be used for political purposes.
Decentralization resulted in a two-tiered system in which the better-off segments of the population opted for private, managed health care, while low-income groups were left to depend on public services of uneven or poor quality, in which preventative medicine as well as contraception had long been undervalued.
It was in this context, as politics and health care provision became deeply entangled and the demand for contraception rose among low-income groups with few alternative options for birth control, that sterilization acquired importance in the clientelistic exchange of medical care for votes.
From the paper, quote, Considering all our sterilized respondents, 71% said that they took the initiative of asking for the surgery, while 22% reported that the physician had suggested the procedure or had provided a medical indication for it.
People want reproductive health care that they just didn't have access to.
One doctor they spoke with explained the prevalence of sterilizations.
The reason one of them is that there's a shortage of other options.
And even if something like the pill was available, it's only available, quote, on an irregular basis, which prevents...
In this climate, where there is a demand for birth control and no access to it, people who are in positions to provide some access pop up.
The authors of the paper talked to another surgeon who explained, quote, Essentially, These mayors are friends of physicians.
Essentially the way it would work is that because the state wouldn't reimburse the doctor for performing a tubal ligation, they would do it in conjunction with another procedure at the patient's request in order to game the bureaucracy.
Of the 281 women they spoke to, 159 had personally asked a politician for a favor to get a tubal ligation, and 100 said that they, quote, returned the favor by voting for them.
78 of those 100 even, quote, tried to obtain additional votes for their benefactors.
It's a compelling snapshot here of this mutually beneficial yet inherently exploitative system that arose out of the inability of people to access reliable services.
self-directive reproductive health care.
It's always so fascinating to me how I can get curious about a subject that Alex is talking about, scratch the surface a little bit, and find that the exact solution to it is the thing that he opposes the most.
Yep.
And again, nothing that I'm saying is meant to minimize or pretend that eugenic applications of sterilization have not been used many times in history.
That's absolutely the truth.
It's just that there's a wider story that exists in terms of Brazilian history than Alex cares to even be curious about.
The headline he's reporting on is about this investigation in Brazil, and it's nothing new.
A parliamentary commission of inquiry was opened in 1967 to explore accusations of mass sterilizations, and another was launched in 1983.
There was a third opened in 1991, quote, to examine the spread of female sterilization in Brazil and identify persons or organizations responsible for its misuse.
This was followed by a National Congress investigation in 1992 that was to examine, quote, the possible racist motivations behind the provision of sterilization, the role of international agencies and interests, the availability of alternative birth control methods to low-income women, and the politically motivated use of tubal ligations.
The result was that, quote, in its final report, the congressional CPI echoed the findings of the state's investigations by noting that pervasive poverty and the lack of reproductive health services contributed to women's dependence on sterilization as a birth control method.
This has been a matter that's widely discussed, and it's something that has been investigated and talked about in terms of Brazil for many years.
And I'm fairly certain that Alex doesn't even know about the existence of these previous investigations.
He just thinks that recently in Brazil someone found NSSM-200, and the whole thing's blowing up and exploding now, which is just dumb.
Alex provides his audience with a dumb but easy-to-understand story that leads them to accepting bad positions.
If you're opposed to sterilization being used as a birth control method, then waging a crusade against widespread access to alternative birth control methods is exactly the wrong way to do it.
And even the system that that one paper that I found discussing the clientelism aspect of it in poorer, less developed areas, like that is intrinsically exploitative.
It's just that the stories that you hear about sterilization campaigns being used as methods of genocide or eugenics are what Alex wants you to think every single birth control initiative ever has been.
Yeah, because if it is one time a rational choice, then that means that there are other people who can make that same rational choice and then all of a sudden there are a lot of things that you have to recontextualize as maybe that's a rational choice too until it becomes reasonable to assume that some forms of birth control are rational actors and then your whole argument about how everybody's trying to kill you is kind of gone.
But Alex takes this story about Brazil, and you can see him pivot it, because he doesn't know really what anything is about, and he has a certain amount of talking points.
And he makes it about vaccines, because he also believes that they're trying to sterilize the third world through putting secret stuff in vaccines and stuff.
And so he just takes this story and makes it about that because it works.
Anyway, as we discuss on pretty much every 2003 episode, one of the things I'm most interested in is trying to figure out if Alex believes he's fighting the literal Christian devil.
It's how you would expect ads to work in a radio show.
Yes!
And the reason that I'm playing it, even though it is more like, here's a topic we're going to get into, before we get to that, I want to talk to you about a sponsor.
Right.
I'm playing that because that's not how he does it.
No, that's almost like a 1950s TV show where they would cut in with an actual actor from the show and be like, I know we're having a grand time watching this thing going on, but first let me tell you about Thompson's...
For those who don't know, they will have CIA FEMA operators, the type of listeners you've seen in the road to tyranny in Kansas City teaching a classroom of police that, quote, Christians...
Founding fathers are terrorists, so what if they have to die?
We have the training manuals, constitutionalist homeschoolers.
If you look conservative, and we've seen these happen, if you've got a giant turban on your head, you speed through.
The FEMA directors on the ground will direct the young troops and the police to go after middle America.
Well, I mean, that's assumed with all of those conversations, just because if you are driving through Austin, you know the only way to avoid the cops is by wearing a turban.
So this story about the fingerprinting, this wasn't mandatory.
Students could choose to use a PIN number.
Which is...
They're right.
They can choose that if they want.
Apparently, this is a really good system for school lunches for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it streamlines overcrowded school lunch lines, which is a problem in many overcrowded schools.
The second is that by making the transaction uniform in appearance, you completely eliminate the stigma that many kids feel if they're on lunch assistance programs.
And the concerns were addressed.
A copy of the student's fingerprint is connected to a unique identifier, but the stored data isn't the actual fingerprint.
Also, quote, parents who do not want their child fingerprinted may obtain an opt-out form.
Your argument to me can never be, can you imagine making a sci-fi film in the 70s and thinking, oh, they'll use their fingerprints to get lunches.
That's nothing to me.
If every time I use my fucking credit card, I tap it against a thing and it references a ridiculous amount of information about me in an instant and then comes back and they know it all.
The real complaints that he has, or the ones that are based in reality, are things that people are aware of and other people are conversing about in...
The things that are nonsense that he's yelling about are all just things to be appeals to the emotions of the audience in order to bring them closer to that bottleneck that gets them to making a hundred copies of his movie.
It is interesting that he's in a place where it's like, somehow he exists in a space where we've learned less in the intervening time from when he started.
So I found an article in the Albert Lee Tribune from January 2003 about a raid on a house where a female baby tiger was taken, quote, because the owners did not have a permit for possessing the wild animal.
The problem though is that the owner of this tiger is a 17-year-old kid who said that his 15-year-old sister is the pet's owner.
I don't know much, but I don't believe this caller is 17. No.
Then, I read this little nugget in the Tribune article.
Quote, Peter also emphasized the past record of the child's father, who has also lived in the house, saying it indicates the family's inability to provide appropriate care for the tiger.
The father was barred from having a pet by the court in October 2001 as a penalty for a cruelty to animals conviction.
However, the child said his father is not living at the residence anymore.
I'm intentionally not using these people's names because as I was getting into this, I had no idea if they are the people who are involved in talking to us.
But it was like, how many raids resulting in the confiscation of a baby tiger went down in the first few months of 2003 in Minnesota?
I can't imagine that the number's higher than one.
I found a follow-up article that includes some other bizarre details.
Apparently, that whole thing, the tiger seizure, was set in motion because the child, quote, had scratches and bite marks and was falling asleep in class.
When asked what was up, he, quote, told a teacher that he lived with a tiger and it smelled bad.
Police searched the house and found a malnourished 35-pound tiger cub as well as a bunch of urine Very sad.
There had been reports of people being attacked by his cats in the past, but people had been reluctant to press charges until this incident, which led to the downfall of Tiger Zone and a police search of Grant's home where they found some guns.
This would not be the end of Grant trying to hurt people with tigers.
In 2005, he was arrested after a woman who was employed cleaning up Yeah.
Anyway, this guy's lying to Alex about the circumstances of his run-in with the police.
And yes, Jordan, you brought up Tiger King.
After the success of that documentary, Grant's nephew tried to kickstart a documentary about this whole thing, but it apparently didn't take off.
And also, in the Kickstarter, it says, this is not just because Tiger King happened.
I don't know if it's this guy's daughter or who the person is, but there's someone who's in the trailer talking very passionately about how hard it was to watch people take away these tigers that she knew and cared about as friends or pets.
Anyway, I would say that the fact that he sold a tiger to this person who was keeping it in their house and the tiger was peeing and shitting in the house and recklessly around this child, it means that he's not necessarily doing due diligence and vetting who is able to adopt these animals.
And that to me is a red flag.
Along with the multiple people who were attacked by his animals.
And I would say that it's probably more than the others.
I would say there are more people who do it responsibly than irresponsibly.
At the same time...
Still a red flag to me.
That's one of those industries where it's not, I mean, and it's not even like I think it's evil or malicious or anything.
It's just like there should always be somebody, there should always be a neutral third-party observer on the ground at all time being like, that's not okay.
I think that it's unquestioningly accepting this guy's version of the story only serves to use them as a prop to push the government's out of control and want to take your Tigers narrative, which is silly.
If you've got a disreputable tiger zoo operator who is willing to sell cubs, you are going to find out you have more than one incident about tigers in your region very soon.
And I tried to figure out just like what the bottom line about him was, but I wasn't really that interested, so I don't really mind that I didn't figure it out, because he's just kind of a guy who is the standard New World Order talking points.
Just kind of someone who's playing a game of boring ping pong with Alex.
Mr. Hey Guy, I first started listening to you back around 1992-1993 on the American Freedom Network.
Uh-huh.
And I listened to you religiously back then.
I was working in a bank myself, handling the mutual funds and annuities and other insurance products for the bank.
And I took your advice.
I got out of the market when I was setting, the Dow Jones was setting a $3,300.
And I bought $410, $15 gold, and I'm still waiting for my gold to come back, and the market's been to $11, $6, and back and forth.
Bought a few of your books, and I put them up on my bookcase.
They're right beside my copies of The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey.
So you said in that book that you're a little bit premature.
I guess you were about seven or eight years on the peak of the market.
I guess what I'm hearing you say today, Mr. Hagin, with all due respect, is anybody that reads Alex Jones' Infowars.net or Infowars.com and stays abreast of the current.
Mainstream publications and stuff.
I'm not hearing anything new out of you, Mr. Hegel.
I'm still waiting for the $3,000 to $5,000 gold.
Well, have you been watching gold?
Yeah, I've been watching it.
I've been watching it for the last nine years, you know.
Well, I haven't recommended it that far back.
Oh, yeah, you were on American Freedom.
I listened to you religiously back then and would call into your talk shows.
A little bit of like, yeah, perhaps maybe I was a little bit early on things, but I think as a whole, if you look at the total thing, you know, whatever.
I would almost imagine if I was planning a show where I knew Alex was going to have a gold guy on, I would have a giant button with an X on it for if an econ professor called.
Just like a button I could run to, press, technical difficulties, just a thin line, just...
Well, I imagine from what that guy said is he was invested in the Dow when it was up high, and the guy was like, it's gonna collapse, and you should put it all into gold.
Gold's going to skyrocket up to $3,000 an ounce or whatever it is.
So, Jordan, we've come to the end of this adventure in 2003 and...
Some of that stuff was fun.
But I also think it's very valuable to recognize these little glimpses where Alex speaks a little bit more about his positions that we kind of got the sense were admirable, like his opposition to the death penalty or preference for drug legalization.
These things are things that you can agree with, I guess, in terms of like the end result of them.
I mean, the thing that gets me about that, though, is that it's like, because he's so malicious, And so, I suppose, fungible on just about anything.
Like, no matter what it is you agree with him on, he doesn't care about anything other than...
Finding a way to give himself and white men more power.
So even if you can't agree with him on an issue and then come together or even work together or anything towards that, because if he's given any access, he's going to take whatever access he's given and funnel it towards the point of white male dominance.
So even, you know, it's like there's not even an issue that you can talk to him about because his only issue...
Beyond all the takes on the news of the day, the end result of all of this should be white men running everything, me specifically.