#787: January 23, 2004
Today, Dan and Jordan dip back into the past to see what turns up in their nets. In this installment, Alex interviews an anti-abortion activist who is up to no good.
March 20, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:04:35
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have great respect for knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jordan. | |
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| I have a quick question for you, sir. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My brain spot today, Jordan, is I've been looking for some dumb shows just to watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| And, you know, when I need to relax or something, you know, a little bit of entertainment. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| I mean, I've watched all of Survivor. | ||
| I don't really like the challenge. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Cooking shows maybe have fallen out of grace for me. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I can only look at food so much. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| So I found a show. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That I've taken to. | ||
| If this is a perfect match, I'm going to be furious with you. | ||
| Okay, but Summer described that to us. | ||
| Will Summer described that to us, and it made me want to throw up. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I haven't checked in on that show. | ||
| Actually, I'd forgotten until you just brought it back up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is a show called The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Skinwalker Ranch is, like, this place in, like, I think it's Utah that's notorious among the paranormal and UFO communities. | ||
| There's, like, UFOs there all the time. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Okay, I was worried that Skinwalker was, like, a normal... | ||
| Like, it's a show about a regular ranch, and it just so happened to be named Skinwalker. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| As opposed to being a Skinwalker, you know, like that kind of thing. | ||
| It's a being of native lore, apparently the skinwalker. | ||
| The skinwalker. | ||
| So there's this ranch. | ||
| I'm amazed you've never heard of it. | ||
| Basically one of the big things in like, but I guess maybe that's not something you spent too much time on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, Dan, the number of things I have never heard of are uncountable. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| So, I don't believe any of this stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's silly. | |
| Right. | ||
| But, they have such an awesome team of people who are investigating this stuff. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So there's a doctor who's there for some reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| He's kind of a zero. | ||
| In case somebody gets hurt by a ghost. | ||
| There's the lead investigator who's kind of a zero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And then there's the main character of the show who's like an astrophysicist guy from a college in Alabama who's supposed to be the skeptical guy. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That lasts an episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then he's just making excuses for everything, which is great. | |
| So he's not going to get a job at CERN anytime soon. | ||
| It's very clear how much at the beginning is playing up the idea of like... | ||
| Look, I don't know about any of this stuff. | ||
| By like three or four episodes in, he's like, when I first showed up, I was very... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, that kind of thing. | ||
| But the star is the head of security. | ||
| His name is Dragon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| The head of security at Skinwalker Ranch or the head of security for this team of investigators? | ||
| The head of security at Skinwalker Ranch. | ||
| Dragon. | ||
| Dragon. | ||
| He is... | ||
| He has so much input on their investigation for reasons unknown. | ||
| Okay, alright. | ||
| I'm gonna say this. | ||
| I'm gonna say this. | ||
| Dragon... | ||
| Came with Skinwalker Ranch and just emerges from the ground and then returns to the ground. | ||
| There's no other explanation. | ||
| He might have come through a portal or something. | ||
| Yeah, there's no other explanation. | ||
| But yeah, I find myself watching it and I'm like, come on, dragon. | ||
| And just having that thought is really funny. | ||
| So yeah, the premise of the show is that this multi-millionaire or billionaire guy bought Skinwalker Ranch in order to investigate it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so these people are always reporting back to this multi-millionaire. | ||
| The episode that I'm on, I just started season two, the episode that I'm on is entirely about they found a hole and they poured a bunch of water in it and it drained faster than they thought it would. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I feel like this is not far off from the plot of an Inspector Gadget episode. | ||
| Is it possible that this is a vortex we found where all the water is going? | ||
| Yes, Mr. Gadget. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Fucking dragon. | ||
| Anyway, I don't know why there's multiple seasons of it, quite frankly. | ||
| Well, because, I mean, they haven't found it yet. | ||
| They haven't found anything. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's why you gotta make another season. | ||
| They think they've found a ton of stuff. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| You gotta think you've found a lot of stuff, otherwise you might quit. | ||
| Very unconvincing. | ||
| Anyway, what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is the new album from M83. | ||
| First album in a long, long time. | ||
| That's some sort of electronic rock kind of beep boops. | ||
| Yeah, it's beep boops. | ||
| Everybody remembers Midnight City. | ||
| Yeah, I recall that. | ||
| That's come up on a few playlists. | ||
| Spotify recommended things, I think. | ||
| Yeah, and M83 is always a reliable source for a surprise saxophone, which, as we all know, Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's what you need. | ||
| It's best when a saxophone isn't expected. | ||
| And it just shows up out of nowhere, and he always does it in the right way. | ||
| You're like, this is all beep boops, this is all, and then bam, saxophone solo. | ||
| There's a new album, though? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| It's pretty good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I would suggest listening to it. | ||
| I'll have to check that out. | ||
| I'm trying to listen to more music in times when I maybe would have listened to podcasts. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| I'm trying to diversify a little bit because there's so much just talking. | ||
| Music brings something to your life. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I haven't listened to a lot of podcasts for a while. | ||
| I've cut way, way back, and I'm listening to more music while I'm at. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It probably isn't something us as podcasters should be doing. | ||
| Honestly, I think podcasts are boring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Actually, I was listening to some boss tones because I needed some horns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Expected saxophone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was listening to Question the Answers, one of their great albums. | ||
| Oh, I had a couple of things. | ||
| First, I always have said... | ||
| That I'm a Boston's guy from way back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And these are the Weeki Weeki Boston's, I believe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mighty Mighty. | |
| Oh, Mighty Mighty. | ||
| Okay, I got it backwards. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, man, I think I fell off around Jackknife to a Swan. | ||
| That was the last album that I really was into. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| And I realized as I was looking over their discography, I'm like... | ||
| That came out like 20-something years ago. | ||
| I still think of it in my head as like, ah, yeah, that was a later era of Boston. | ||
| I was like, that was a long time ago. | ||
| But I was listening to Question the Answers, and there's a song on it called Jump Through the Hoops. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's just about how, like, yeah, I gotta go through the motions. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, yeah. | ||
| Holidays suck. | ||
| We gotta do all the stuff, yeah. | ||
| So one verse is about Dickie Barrett's job. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he's like, my job, it's a nine-to-five nightmare, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Great. | ||
| Yeah, we can all relate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's tough. | |
| We've been there. | ||
| The next lyric is, I'm serving whiskey, stale wit, and beer. | ||
| And as a kid, it always... | ||
| Like, bothered me that, like, that doesn't make sense. | ||
| He's a daytime bartender? | ||
| Are you working at, like, a hotel bar? | ||
| Where is this? | ||
| This is the Wild West. | ||
| A cowboy shows up at 8.30 wanting a little shot of whiskey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get it. | |
| Dickie Barrett, the king of Boston ska, is working a day shift bartending gig? | ||
| This is, what? | ||
| That never made sense to me. | ||
| And I didn't have context for it because I was like... | ||
| I was a kid, and I didn't have a job. | ||
| I didn't know 9 to 5. I'm like, maybe you better check in at 9 to 5 and do where it's so whiskey. | ||
| I do like the idea, you know, of Chicago specifically, that like, you know, oh man, I wish every bar was a 4 a.m. bar. | ||
| Just those, you know, now these 2 a.m. bars, that's not fair. | ||
| But then you go back 40 years, and you've got to think there were people being like, I wish every bar was a 24-hour bar again. | ||
| What the hell is wrong with people that I can't get drunk at 6.30 in the morning, you know? | ||
| Now I have to stay home. | ||
| Well, Dickie might have worked at the airport. | ||
| That's possible, yeah. | ||
| That's not in the song. | ||
| But anyway, I just... | ||
| I've felt bad because I have this conflicted relationship now that Dickie Barrett's an anti-vax anti-covid guy and broke up the band. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
| The infected boss tones now. | ||
| Some of that stuff holds up, though. | ||
| I believe you. | ||
| That early stuff's pretty great. | ||
| I believe you. | ||
| Anyway, Jordan, today we have an episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Indeed. | |
| We're going to be talking about more noise and other disturbances. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to be talking about Skakor, the devil, and more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| No. | ||
| We're going to be talking about an episode from 2004. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| Because I've been, you know, I have a speaking engagement this week, and so preparing for that has been, you know, I've been juggling a little bit of that, and I was listening to some present day stuff, and it's just a slog, and I'm not interested. | ||
| It's not as good as the boss tones, that's for sure. | ||
| No. | ||
| And so I felt like we should check back in, although... | ||
| We're kind of in a no man's land in 2004. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because we know how he covered Saddam's capture. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We know that he still kind of thinks that the bath party is being installed back into power. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a very bizarre kind of... | ||
| Who knows what's going on? | ||
| He's not talking about the primaries of 2004 at this point yet. | ||
| And so I don't really have a goal in mind, but I enjoy listening to it a lot more. | ||
| There's a lot more information, a lot more stuff you can learn from those. | ||
| And so I was dipping back, seeing what I could find, and the Dean scream. | ||
| Is on the 19th of January. | ||
| Gotcha! | ||
| The evening of the 19th. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is when he does the Dean scream. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so today, this has nothing to do with that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Just for some sort of gauging where we are, we're jumping back in here on January 23rd. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 2004. | ||
| And today's going to be probably a little bit shorter than normal, but I found something that I thought really sucks. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Good enough for us! | ||
| Man. | ||
| This sucks. | ||
| And we'll get down to business on that. | ||
| But first, Jordan, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, self-elected president of the Butler PA Knowledge Fight Fan Club. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| They're trying to be the new Chico. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They are. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We'll come to Pennsylvania and do a show. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Next, Knox Revenge. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, I just wanted to hear Dan and Jordan say Susquehanna. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| I'm probably mispronouncing that. | ||
| But anyway, you're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much! | |
| I believe it's Susquehanna. | ||
| Susquehanna. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Quokka. | ||
| Next, I'm Father Jones' syrupy sweet Texas drawl. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| And Studio Gribbly Pibbly presents My Neighbor Pachanik. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Hey, we got a technocrat in the mix, Jordan, so thank you so much to Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean-style hot sauce named after him, and it's delicious. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four stars. | |
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| I bet that would be a good hot sauce. | ||
| Probably a habanero base. | ||
| Yeah, you know... | ||
| Caribbean sauces tend to enjoy a little bit of those fruitier peppers. | ||
| I mean, I've always had the idea, obviously being from Chicago, to make Jar Jar Links. | ||
| You know, you make... | ||
| It just makes perfect sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you jerk them, you know, that way you've got the Caribbean style. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, it all works. | ||
| But you have to always, like, if you're serving them, you have to, like, juggle them and almost drop them on the floor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It is also a physical comedy-based store. | ||
| It's a pret fall sausage. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, Jordan, like I said, there's not a lot going on. | ||
| We get into, like, a real dead zone of content. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Alex preoccupies himself quite a bit with Building 7 stuff about 9-11, but it's not stuff that we haven't heard before, and it's all pretty bland shit. | ||
| But he's very, very excited about it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so that takes up a lot of his time over the course of multiple days. | ||
| And it took a while to get to anything that I really thought may... | ||
| inherited our attention. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'll be honest, at first, I didn't even think this was it. | |
| But after looking into it a little bit more, I found that it was quite important. | ||
| Welcome, my friends. | ||
| It is Friday, the 23rd day of January of 2004. | ||
| I still can't get used to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Seems like yesterday was 1999. | |
| Make broadcast lined up for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got... | |
| Operation Rescue West coming on in the second hour. | ||
| It's a First Amendment issue, not just trying to stop the 45 million-plus murders. | ||
| But, you know, they have a big truck with a picture of a baby, a live baby, and then a dead baby on the side. | ||
| And they've been arrested and they're being charged. | ||
| They're trying to tell people all over the country that they cannot expose what's really happening. | ||
| But PBS can show video of all the dead Jews in World War II, images of thousands of naked bodies being bulldozed into pits, and I think that's good. | ||
| It's good that they show that. | ||
| We should know what evil's all about. | ||
| We should see the results of evil and what happens when you don't stand up to it. | ||
| But you can show... | ||
| The murders in Africa, murders by Saddam in the Middle East. | ||
| You can show murders by Pol Pot. | ||
| You can show murders by Hitler. | ||
| But you better not show the murders in this country. | ||
| In fact, they're taking down websites that show this all over the place. | ||
| I got a couple points on this one. | ||
| The first is that I think that if someone was driving around in a van with pictures of victims of the Holocaust on the side of it, that might also not be super appropriate. | ||
| I don't think that the reality of human atrocity should be watered down or ignored, but there's a place for that kind of thing. | ||
| Maybe the side of a van isn't it. | ||
| I mean, if your argument is that the van is a good place for it and the other side of your van has a unicorn on it, I think we're having a bad day. | ||
| Well, yeah, but Alex is also comparing something that was in a documentary versus something that's on the side of a van. | ||
| Nothing should be put on the side of a van that isn't a dragon or a unicorn. | ||
| Or the business name or something. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that is also an option. | ||
| Second, there's a difference between all of those things that Alex is listing off versus abortion. | ||
| All of those other things are murders, whereas an abortion is not. | ||
| He's welcome to his very strongly held belief that it is, but that's not going to impact how most of the rest of the country feels. | ||
| So this story has to do with an anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue West, who were charged with a misdemeanor for what they call their truth truck. | ||
| The issue wasn't that they had pictures of dead babies on it. | ||
| It was that in Bel Air, Kansas, there's an ordinance that prohibits cars with portable signs on them, essentially banning moving billboards. | ||
| The charges were dropped in March, most likely because it wasn't that big of a deal and the city realized that the group thrived off being persecuted, so maybe it wasn't even worth the trouble. | ||
| West was led by a man named Troy Newman, who's going to be the guest that comes on here later, and a large amount of his specific activism was against a reproductive care doctor in Kansas named George Tiller. | ||
| In fact, the misdemeanor charge happened when he was driving his truck near the home of one of Tiller's nurses in a very clear attempt to harass and intimidate her. | ||
| For years, they went after Tiller to the extent of planning a mock trial accusing him of mass murder. | ||
| Incidentally, Tiller was murdered himself. | ||
| In May 2009. | ||
| Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder, was a frequent donor to Operation Rescue West, and when he was arrested, the phone number for Operation Rescue West's senior policy advisor, Cheryl Sullinger, was found in his car. | ||
| Sullinger, when pressed on it, had to admit that she had spoken with Roeder in the past and had specifically given him information about Tiller's whereabouts in the past, like court appearances and the like. | ||
| Also, Selinger served two years in jail, quote, after pleading guilty to conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in California in 1988. | ||
| Alex is going to have this guy from Operation Rescue West on the show to complain about this misdemeanor charge that's going to be dropped in a few months, but it's critical to understand that what... | ||
| Alex is interviewing someone who is a... | ||
| Stochastic terrorist, quite frankly. | ||
| This is who Alex has always been. | ||
| When we go back to the past, we see constant appearances by thinly disguised Nazis and white supremacists. | ||
| We see promotion of groups that inspire domestic terrorism. | ||
| And you see that in the present day, too. | ||
| This is who he is. | ||
| This is never... | ||
| It's just not been as obvious in the past, maybe. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| Or people weren't paying attention. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Who was investigating this dude? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Who was investigating... | ||
| Who was like, hey, Alex is having a literal terrorist on his show. | ||
| Like, nobody was paying attention to him. | ||
| Nobody was paying attention, not just to Alex, but to the guests that he had on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just got another crazy conspiracy theorist on, you know? | ||
| But I honestly don't even think it's that. | ||
| I think that people would just be like, who? | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, yes, the people who would have paid attention, period, though, that's their perception. | ||
| Because we know that all the way up until however, practically now still, you know? | ||
| I mean, I think that so much of the criticism of Alex that existed on message boards, you know, even... | ||
| Pretty close to up to our starting of the show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Had to do with him being a tool of Israel, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| The criticism about him was in itself a conspiracy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, yeah, there was not a lot of attention being paid to stuff like this, like the cadre of weirdos and dangerous folks that he has on the show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, this dude is going to show up, and they're going to have a little bit of an interview. | ||
| Maybe the only thing that's important on this episode, quite frankly, is this story that seemed kind of just like a throwaway bullshit. | ||
| They're mad that people have an abortion truck or whatever. | ||
| But no, it's worse. | ||
| Yeah, to obfuscate what is actually going on by just being like, oh, look at how innocent this van is! | ||
| We should all be aware of what's going on. | ||
| Well, to be fair, I mean, as fair as you can be, this is in 2004, and Tiller wasn't killed until 2009. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That hasn't happened yet. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Now, granted, their senior policy advisor is in contact with people who... | ||
| May eventually murder. | ||
| And herself planned to bomb an abortion clinic and went to prison for it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you have adjacency of... | ||
| Like this... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't looked into enough of the, let's say, anti-abortion pro-life groups. | ||
| But I would assume that there's some who are very disconnected from folks who would bomb an abortion clinic. | ||
| You would hope. | ||
| And those would be the folks that I would hope you'd interview. | ||
| The people who are at least... | ||
| More than zero steps removed from someone who planned to bomb an abortion clinic. | ||
| I suppose. | ||
| But instead, these are the sort of groups that Alex elevates. | ||
| These are the sort of people that he gets involved with, and it's not a coincidence. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So, Alex introduces Troy, and it's weird. | ||
| He doesn't really know the details of this guy's story at all. | ||
| Troy Newman is the president of OperationRescue.org. | ||
| And pro-life websites have been getting hacked and taken down around the country, folks. | ||
| They are putting directories into all the big corporations and libraries, blocking out Patriot, real conservative websites. | ||
| The Neocon websites don't ever have a problem. | ||
| We're talking to Troy Newman and WorldNetDailyStory on InfoWars.com from yesterday. | ||
| He was arrested by the two police out in Bel Air, California. | ||
| You can see a picture of the truck. | ||
| They're on the website. | ||
| This is the second time Alex has referred to Bel Air as being in California on this episode. | ||
| Because he's the Fresh Prince. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I understand why that would be where your brain goes, but here's the thing. | ||
| Troy and this group is pretty prominent in the pro-life agitation movement, let's say. | ||
| And it's very well known that they're in Kansas. | ||
| And so that, to me, seems strange. | ||
| One time, it's like, well, it's a slip of the tongue. | ||
| Obviously, you think of Bel Air from The Fresh Prince. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| It's a bad sign. | ||
| It makes sense to me because he doesn't actually care about the movement. | ||
| Like, and I understand that he cares about abortion, but he doesn't care about like, oh, well, I need to make contacts in this place or this place or this place. | ||
| I need to be aware of who's doing what everywhere. | ||
| At this point in time, he's just trying to do a radio show, you know? | ||
| Yeah, but if you care somewhat about the issue itself, you'd know... | ||
| A little bit about the notable figures, you'd think. | ||
| You'd think. | ||
| I'm aware of where other people in disinformation research are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| At least generally speaking. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It seems like a bizarre level of not caring. | ||
| Well, I mean, but think about it this way, Dan. | ||
| You are aware of disinformation space, right? | ||
| I'm also on the show. | ||
| I'm not aware of too much of the disinformation space because I'm an entertainer, right? | ||
| Alex is an entertainer. | ||
| If you were interviewing somebody who was doggedly harassing a particular doctor. | ||
| I know, fine. | ||
| I think you have a responsibility to know a little more. | ||
| You're making a good point. | ||
| So anyway, Troy comes in and him and Alex do some lying about stats. | ||
| Well, we're a pro-life organization. | ||
| Gosh, about 15 years ago with the sole purpose of ending child killing in America. | ||
| And we're doing it primarily these days through education efforts. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| By bringing a window into the abortion clinic. | ||
| You know, years ago we said if wombs had windows, there'd be no abortion. | ||
| You ever hear of that one? | ||
| Yes, and now they have the high-powered, color, I'm losing my mind here, the test they do where you can see the baby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, the big 3D sonograms. | ||
| Yes, the 3D sonograms. | ||
| 4D, yeah, there's motion to it as well. | ||
| Yeah, 4D, and now the majority of men and women, the numbers have reversed the last 10 years, are now against abortion. | ||
| Young people are against abortion even more than their parents. | ||
| 72%, huh? | ||
| 72% of the young people nowadays, according to a recent Gallup poll, consider themselves to be pro-life. | ||
| Well, we took that slogan a step further. | ||
| If the wombs had windows, there'd be no abortion. | ||
| We've got a window into the abortion clinic, and I'm telling you, it's not a pretty sight. | ||
| Every abortion kills a little baby, and it's a bloody, gory mess. | ||
| It's a bloody gory mess. | ||
| It's a bloody gory mess. | ||
| So this discussion of statistics is just not real. | ||
| Gallup has polled pro-life versus pro-choice self-description at least going back to 1996. | ||
| And in 2004, approximately 43% of respondents called themselves pro-life compared to about 49% who were pro-choice. | ||
| The highest they've ever polled pro-life identification was in 2009 at 51%, which I think, you know, if you consider what was going on around then, you could consider it a conservative resurgence that was going on due to the election of Obama. | ||
| Obama, Tea Party sentiment rising. | ||
| I think you can understand why there would be a little bump there. | ||
| Also, in our present day, pro-life sentiment is polling almost as poorly as it ever has, about 39%, trailed only by 1996 when it was around 33%. | ||
| These folks use fraudulent statistics to create the impression that their extreme views and extreme actions are actually mainstream and supported by the vast majority of the population. | ||
| This is meant to help radicalize the listeners of the show while simultaneously pacifying them from any fears about whether or not what they're supporting is in fact extremism. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| 73%. | ||
| Here's a sticking point for me. | ||
| I get the idea that if you have a window into the womb, then you see a larval worm growing, or whatever it is they call them. | ||
| What I don't understand is if you think that's a baby... | ||
| How is an ultrasound not complete child pornography as well? | ||
| That's just insane. | ||
| We're all stupid. | ||
| This is pretend. | ||
| Are you working on a new five minutes? | ||
| No, I'm just bothered by this insanity. | ||
| How can you not think clearly? | ||
| It bums me out. | ||
| Your rebuttal is not compelling. | ||
| No, it's not a rebuttal. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| It's all stupid. | ||
| Nah, that's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| But they're very passionate about it. | ||
| We eat eggs. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Not human eggs. | ||
| Now we will. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Because that's my next plan. | ||
| Klaus Schwab, you will eat human eggs. | ||
| You will eat the human eggs. | ||
| So yeah, the reality of the situation is that this guy, Troy, a large part of what he does is rally against George Tiller. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because we're in the present day, we know what ends up happening. | ||
| But because they don't, a lot of the behaviors that Alex and this guy engage in on this show look really bad in hindsight. | ||
| Like this clip. | ||
| And I wouldn't expect, I mean, I'd expect this in Bel Air, California, but not Bel Air, Kansas. | ||
| Well, we'll tell you what, it's a little bit bigger. | ||
| This is Wichita, Kansas. | ||
| Wichita, which is just one mile south of Bel Air, is the abortion capital of the world. | ||
| I don't know if your listeners know that, but that's where... | ||
| George Tiller resides, and he has the biggest abortion clinic in the world. | ||
| He claims to have more third-trimester abortion experience than anybody in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Let's call it what it is. | ||
| He has the biggest death camp in the U.S. Exactly, and he's got a huge full-size crematorium there that the smoke billows out with the smoke of dead babies, and his office manager resides in Bel Air. | ||
| Yeah, so Alex is real actively involved in sort of helping push this person as a target, as he ends up being. | ||
| Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this. | ||
| Tiller was killed in church. | ||
| He was at church, and some guy came in and just assassinated him. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because they're pro-life. | |
| It's really difficult to see this and consider any of these actions acceptable. | ||
| He's running a death camp. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, not just that, but because of the issue that we're dealing with of abortion, the laws to protect those people have been specifically watered down as much as possible. | ||
| The laws to protect Tiller were almost as... | ||
| I mean, at that time, he was being harassed for years. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| And what he was doing was legal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He did perform later term abortions, but it was not illegal there. | ||
| So why are we allowing this man to be harassed for eight years again and again and again? | ||
| Because it's political free speech. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The reason is because it's political free speech for this man to harm and attack Tiller. | ||
| And it is against the law for Tiller to fight back. | ||
| True. | ||
| And that's the truth. | ||
| And the extent to which you want to make arguments against access to abortion, I guess you could make the argument that a lot of that is very much, it should be protected free speech. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But some of this other stuff, I don't know how appropriate it is. | ||
| When you have a powder keg type issue like this, saying that this person is running a death camp, saying that kind of stuff, Articulating it as a murder factory or comparing it to Holocaust stuff. | ||
| He's a mass murderer. | ||
| We're going to put him on trial for mass murder. | ||
| These kinds of things, you have to understand that what you're doing is trying to incite violence against this person. | ||
| Yeah, you are making it reasonable to kill him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That is what you are doing. | ||
| You're building a public case. | ||
| Yeah, there's no other explanation. | ||
| You are telling people who believe you that this man is a mass murderer. | ||
| Honestly, If this were true, then the man who went to church and killed him is a good guy. | ||
| Because this man is mass murdering people. | ||
| But do you know what it's not? | ||
| It's not even close to true. | ||
| And you're fucking killing people based on these lies. | ||
| Yeah, and consider the headspace that you're putting people in, largely, that may be a little bit... | ||
| Unwell, unhealthy mentally, who also believe the things that you do, you're telling them that this person is a mass murderer. | ||
| Yeah, deserving of death. | ||
| And... | ||
| It's legal, the mass murder that he's doing. | ||
| Now, a bunch of people have been trying to change these laws in order to get this person punished by laws. | ||
| We want to deal with this through the legal system, but it's impossible. | ||
| We've exhausted all of these avenues. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| He's going to get away with it. | ||
| How difficult is it to imagine that what you're doing is making... | ||
| The argument for someone who is unwell to take things into their own hands. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And to see Alex so actively engaged in it in 2004 is pretty gross. | ||
| Honestly, it is framing this situation as... | ||
| A moral responsibility to burn down that clinic. | ||
| To burn down the death camp. | ||
| Not only is it the right thing to do, it is your moral responsibility to do that as a human being who does not want to watch people die. | ||
| I'm not sure if it's fully framing that, but it's definitely that is what you could hear. | ||
| It's a possible reading someone could have. | ||
| Well, I mean, if we actually knew that across the street there was a death camp, it would be my moral responsibility to go over there and stop it. | ||
| If I could. | ||
| And even if I can't. | ||
| Even if I can't. | ||
| Yeah, you might be right. | ||
| But what if you want to bring witches into it? | ||
| Good question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The additional perspective is that abortion is actually a satanic blood sacrifice ritual. | |
| I should clarify, this is a caller that they get. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they actually draw their power on it, and that's why they feel that you're threatening their power base, and they're going through the extremes to protect it now that they've got it basically on a mass scale. | |
| And I would venture to say that your guests would agree on this, but I'd like his input on it also. | ||
| Magic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate your show, Al. | |
| All right, thank you. | ||
| You go back to Herod, you go back to the Egyptian kings, you go back to Hitler. | ||
| They still believe the mass killing was empowering them. | ||
| A comment, sir? | ||
| Well, it even goes back further than that. | ||
| The Moabites were the first people recorded in the scripture sacrificing their own children. | ||
| All the Baal and Asherah worship were sexual immorality and child-killing. | ||
| In 1 Corinthians, it says those things that the pagans sacrificed, they sacrificed to demons. | ||
| Here at George Tiller's abortion clinic, we regularly see notorious witches going in and out of there, particularly when that big incinerator lights up. | ||
| Yeah, notorious witches. | ||
| Notorious witches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People who are notable for their witchcraft. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, they're known on the streets as big-time witches. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So what we have now is Alex is allowing this guy to put on a presentation that not only is George Tiller a mass murderer, he's complicit with witches and doing a blood sacrifice with these dead babies or these aborted babies in order to gain satanic power of some sort. | ||
| So now we're adding a spiritual responsibility and dimension to this. | ||
| This is so fucked up! | ||
| A few years after this, the guy gets murdered. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| I mean, what else do you say? | ||
| But it's the entire organization's fault. | ||
| It's all of their faults. | ||
| I mean, it is. | ||
| There's a lot of fault to go around. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It is one of those things where, again... | ||
| That is the lack of protection. | ||
| This man can go murder an abortion doctor, and what people will say is, look at this unhinged man. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| Well, actually... | ||
| That's a man who is trying to save your life. | ||
| That is a man who believes that he is saving human lives despite the fact that everyone is against him. | ||
| In his mind, he is perhaps the most noble creature on this fucking planet. | ||
| And you're going to tell him he's unhinged? | ||
| No. | ||
| This man has been fucked over. | ||
| Well, I think that the actual murderer... | ||
| I think he may have been a bit unwell himself. | ||
| For sure, but that's not... | ||
| But what you're saying does, you know, there is something to it. | ||
| You think that you are the noble person who's going in to save everybody. | ||
| And you have these people like Alex and like Troy on these large platforms essentially convincing you that you are the good guy should you behave in the way that you do. | ||
| Makes you think of the guy who went with a gun to comet ping pong. | ||
| That person didn't think he was hurting people. | ||
| He thought he was going to save children. | ||
| And I think that that is one of the ways that you can get people to do awful things, is by convincing them in some perverse way that their awful action is actually morally obligatory or morally commendable. | ||
| And not just that, but after the fact, what are these people going to do? | ||
| They're going to say, that was wrong. | ||
| He should not have killed him. | ||
| Now! | ||
| He may have brought it on himself a little bit with his murdering of babies, but that is not how we behave, anti-abortion friends. | ||
| We are peaceful. | ||
| That's a large part of what Newman said afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I don't know this guy. | ||
| This guy was very wrong. | ||
| No true Scotsman. | ||
| We absolutely would never want someone to hurt this guy who's collaborating with notorious witches. | ||
| Are you fucking talking about, asshole? | ||
| Anyway, one of the things that's really neat about this episode, and it's not actually as neat as I wanted it to be, but Alex does get a few calls from pro-choice people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, they're not the best candidates to be making these arguments. | ||
| Well, they're listening to Infowars. | ||
| Yeah, it's a self-selected bunch. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| But here is one caller who has a belief that people should be allowed to have access to reproductive health. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Henry in Oregon, you say you disagree with our guest on some issue. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I indeed do. | |
| I just want to know where these people get off, thinking they can tell an individual, free, sovereign citizen of the republic. | ||
| What they can put in or take out of their individual body. | ||
| Let me just say something, Henry, right now on this. | ||
| It's a human being. | ||
| It's separate. | ||
| They decide to climb in the sack and do what they do. | ||
| What? | ||
| That is a human life. | ||
| It is completely separate from this rovey weight of, oh, this is part of your body. | ||
| That's a human being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's an opinion, Alex. | |
| That's your opinion based on your Bible, buddy. | ||
| I'm not buying your moral relativism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm telling you that I'm tired of you people trying to stick your Bible in my face, man. | |
| I'm telling you that, you know, you stick to your own beliefs and leave the other individual sovereigns in this country alone because you're making more enemies than you are friends anymore, buddy. | ||
| Oh, you're getting really mad deep down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm past mad. | |
| And I'm telling you, tell your buddy to bring his truck to Chiloquen, Oregon. | ||
| Okay, put him on hold. | ||
| Put him on hold. | ||
| I can tell he's about to... | ||
| Start getting hateful and spewing things we can't have on the radio. | ||
| Man, I tell you. | ||
| You make me sick. | ||
| I can just hear the hate in your voice. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So that's about as good as you're going to get. | ||
| And that's the kind of response that Alex will have, which is put the person on hold. | ||
| He does go back to him, but he doesn't really allow him to make any points. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Yeah, so I guess Alex's best rebuttal is that it's a person, and then the guy, his response is, it's your opinion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then there's nowhere to go from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| We are at an impasse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There is no further argument to be had. | ||
| It is a conflict now. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, you know, based on the repeated word use, I think this guy might be a sovereign citizen. | ||
| I may have heard a little sovereign citizen in there. | ||
| I'm not sure I want to necessarily side with him. | ||
| And he was getting a little bit distracted in the bring your truck around my area, I'll show you what's what kind of there at the end. | ||
| You know, once you're at an impasse, what else is there to do? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| It makes me less willing to be like... | ||
| Tip of the hat to you, sir. | ||
| Yeah, that's not maybe the best way of going about it. | ||
| But you can kind of see how Alex doesn't really want to engage, doesn't really respond. | ||
| Yeah, and that false moral high ground can go fuck off. | ||
| I am not doing any of that shit. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| You just claimed that they're demons and witches and now you don't want hateful content on your show. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is back when Alex would tell people not to say piss or damn on air. | ||
| And now he's just like, oh, they want to piss. | ||
| I'm just saying abortion doctors are demons who are in league with Satan and they are killing your babies. | ||
| And now, sir, sir, I don't want any hateful content on my show, okay? | ||
| So Alex has some thoughts about this caller while he has him on hold that I think are a little ironic. | ||
| So we've got to look at this from a medical aspect. | ||
| We can look at it from a philosophical. | ||
| What's wrong with this guy? | ||
| We've got to protect the little innocents. | ||
| He doesn't get any more weak and defenseless. | ||
| These are babies, buddy. | ||
| And, you know, this is sick. | ||
| And what happens is people are involved in abortions, and they're not man enough to get their minds out from around this. | ||
| And look, I didn't start by attacking this guy. | ||
| We know from listening to Alex for years that he has an intense burning guilt over how he's paid for at least 10 abortions. | ||
| He's never really processed any of his feelings about that, and it manifests pretty regularly in outbursts surrounding reproductive rights. | ||
| At this point, it's not clear if Alex is being honest with the audience about his past abortions, but what we can tell from this clip is that he's very committed to projecting his own guilt onto everyone else. | ||
| In his own mind, he sees supporting access to If it's not wrong to have an abortion, then he doesn't need to feel bad about his past in that area. | ||
| But Alex is also a religious zealot, and he cannot be pro-choice and continue to be at all appealing to the audience that he's fostered. | ||
| Alex personally is trapped, but he recognizes that being pro-choice would be the surest and easiest path for him to unburden himself from that weight that he needlessly carries around. | ||
| And thus, he assumes that's the case for everyone who supports access to abortion. | ||
| They don't actually believe in the right to bodily autonomy. | ||
| They don't have any principled reason for their position. | ||
| They must just be looking for an easy way to alleviate their own guilt. | ||
| Alex is mad because he's talking about himself. | ||
| He can't deal with this caller as an individual because the conversation is barely even about abortion. | ||
| The caller and probably Troy think that it's about abortion, but they don't realize that the host of the show is kind of playing out a psychodrama and using them as props. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, that is one of the problems with being a guest on the show of a malignant narcissist. | ||
| At a certain point, you've got to realize that you're not real to him. | ||
| When you go away, he's like, man, that character in my favorite show was gone, and now I don't know where he is. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It makes it difficult. | ||
| To really find any truth or common ground or anything. | ||
| So Alex gets another caller that disagrees with his position, and here's how that goes. | ||
| Charles in Rhode Island disagrees. | ||
| Go ahead, Charles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Alex, I want to first of all tell you that I'm very conservative. | |
| I was a congressional candidate here in the state of Rhode Island. | ||
| Basically, this abortion issue, I've looked at it right down the line, and unfortunately... | ||
| There's a worse crime than abortion, and that's being born and being unloved. | ||
| I grew up with all those kids over here in the Rhode Island area that had no reason, you know, their parents didn't care about them or anything. | ||
| Well, that's societal breakdown. | ||
| You don't go further down the pit because, quote, quote, oh, well, we think you might be unloved. | ||
| You've got a poor family, so now we're going to abort your baby. | ||
| That's what China does. | ||
| So this caller is articulating his argument for abortion access poorly. | ||
| But you can see how Alex has taken his point and completely distorted it in order to create a straw man that it's easier for him to fight with. | ||
| The idea of having access to abortion for people who end up in situations where they have an unwanted pregnancy, it's not like China's one-child policy. | ||
| It's not forced abortions. | ||
| This is a ridiculous leap that Alex is making because he never actually wants to argue real points. | ||
| He wants to score optical points about like, oh, you're disgusting. | ||
| You think that people should just be, why do we find people who aren't loved and kill them? | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean... | ||
| Especially just because it's so performative. | ||
| There's no conversation. | ||
| There's nothing that can be said or will be said that will have any effect on this. | ||
| This is all for show. | ||
| And it's unfortunate too because even people that you would sort of on the surface agree with or broadly agree with as much as people should have access to reproductive health care, they're still Alex listeners and they're not going to be able to make these arguments in any way that's like... | ||
| Well, you know, they're going to fall into rhetorical traps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, I mean, here's the problem. | ||
| Or be idiots themselves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| The problem is to be pro-choice is a very straight line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| But to be pro-choice and also a conservative or also somebody who's listening to Alex Jones, all of that stuff, you are going to inevitably have to take a twisty path around all of those giant obstacles to going straight to abortion. | ||
| So that means that when you're having a conversation with somebody else who's a conservative, they go, well, why did you go around this obstacle? | ||
| That is there for a reason. | ||
| You are supposed to stop at that obstacle. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Listen to the roadblocks. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, so there's no way to have that conversation intra-party, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we get another caller who is sort of pro-reproductive health. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I'm just going to play a tiny bit. | ||
| We're not going to listen to this call because it's a real bummer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay, we've got a bunch of callers that agree with you, but we've got one more that disagrees. | ||
| Mary in Maryland, you're on the air with our guest. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yes, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like your show, except for this issue. | |
| I wish I had been aborted myself. | ||
| I have done a lot of research, and I would like to make a few points. | ||
| So it's pretty easy to see how Alex could imagine that the opposition to his position is not very well considered, given the callers that disagree. | ||
| But he doesn't take into account that he's self-selected his own opposition. | ||
| People who have strong, well-reasoned pro-reproductive health arguments aren't going to be listening to Alex's show, and they aren't going to call in. | ||
| The opposition he has to worry about contending with are people who listen to his show that disagree with a central pillar of his worldview, which are going to be generally confused folks who are easy to dismiss. | ||
| On the off chance that he gets someone with a good point calling in, it's the easiest thing to just restate their argument in a dishonest way to create a straw man to attack or put them on hold and the job is done. | ||
| My point is that if Alex had to argue with people who weren't InfoWars listeners, he'd be fucked. | ||
| Also, this lady's call is a real severe bummer and I feel for her. | ||
| She says that and she goes on to talk about abuse that she had as a child and her mother having complications. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. | ||
| What I would expect, if we were going to have a conversation about this particular topic, at the very least, what should be represented are the parties directly involved with it. | ||
| Yeah, those are the people who have any kind of skin in the game, as it were. | ||
| Not some random guy who drives around in a van, and not even people who just call in. | ||
| That is not a way to have this conversation in a way that should be had publicly. | ||
| If they want to argue about this nonsense that they're never going to convince each other of off air, then that's fine. | ||
| You're having fun. | ||
| If you're doing it on air, you're just messing with everybody's lives. | ||
| You're wasting everybody's time, and you're confusing them. | ||
| Well, I think there can be... | ||
| Sort of points that are illuminated by talking to people or maybe unrelated to the doctor-patient dynamic of an abortion. | ||
| I think some people can have worthwhile things to add to the conversation, but generally it's not going to be a guy who's a shithead radio host, a guy whose career is harassing an abortion doctor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Those aren't the sort of people. | ||
| It is just going to be... | ||
| Worst and at best, some sort of explosion of quote-unquote entertainment. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Blood sports type shit with a collar or something. | ||
| This is not sports talk radio. | ||
| We are not arguing about whether or not the fucking Giants should have drafted Odell Beckham Jr. | ||
| This is real shit, man. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| But I think they think that they're dealing with it appropriately. | ||
| But they're not. | ||
| As evidenced by this next clip. | ||
| An earlier caller was asking, I believe, Allison in California about this particular abortionist there in Kansas who, quote, was doing some rituals. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| Yes, and let me get to that in just a second. | ||
| I just wanted to just ask a quick question, answer it to yourself. | ||
| Listen to the callers as they've come through and the mental gymnastics that they've gone through in order to justify child killing. | ||
| And it's what George Tiller does here. | ||
| Wichita, Kansas. | ||
| He's a member in good standing of his Reformation Lutheran Church. | ||
| He brings in an apostate pastor to baptize these babies. | ||
| He'll sell you a keepsake urn after he incinerates the bodies of these babies. | ||
| After he baptizes them, he'll sell you the urn, put the ashes in there, and send you home with them. | ||
| There's some bizarre rituals that he does. | ||
| He'll take pictures of the babies. | ||
| If you want to have some postnatal pictures of your bored baby with a crushed skull, he'll provide you those pictures. | ||
| in his abortion millwork. | ||
| Sounds like a snuff film production company. | ||
| You know, that's exactly what I said, and I think he's got a very strange, bizarre mental condition because it's a bizarre phenomenon. | ||
| Pretty nice. | ||
| So, a lot of that stuff that he's describing as snuff film production or, like, weird, bizarre rituals... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think it's an underappreciated aspect, certainly among people like Alex and these folk, that it's not always a very easy choice that people make to terminate a pregnancy. | ||
| And sometimes things like having some kind of cremation or something, it can have closure for the parents. | ||
| And I think that there's something, they're attacking this as something evil, but it's actually one of the most... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| services that a person in Tiller's position could offer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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These are things that allow, you know, someone who had to choose Something that is very painful, allows them to have a closure about it, allows them to honor the fetus. | |
| You know, there's something that could be very helpful and meaningful to that, and it's pretty shitty for Alex and him to be going on like this. | ||
| I mean, honestly, regardless of whether or not you're pro or anti-abortion, we're past that now in the timeline of events, okay? | ||
| This is not something that Tiller is forcing on people. | ||
| This is something that they are asking for. | ||
| They do not have to have this. | ||
| They do not have to get any of this. | ||
| They could walk in and walk out without saying goodbye. | ||
| Yeah, because for some people it's probably not something they would gravitate towards or even need. | ||
| Everybody doesn't have the same needs and requirements in that situation. | ||
| And so now we're talking about... | ||
| This person, this asshole, being like, no, you can't even have any say in what happens afterwards. | ||
| Right, and pretending that these things that are offered as means of helping the parents process and grieve, it's some sort of a perverse thing that Tiller's doing for himself. | ||
| And that's just, I mean, it's disgusting. | ||
| But these are the ways you would characterize someone if you wanted them to be hurt, honestly. | ||
| It's just shit. | ||
| That's just horrific. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So earlier, Troy lied about some statistics, and now Alex gets in the game. | ||
|
unidentified
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How many abortions are done in America every year? | |
| I think it's, what, four and a half million? | ||
|
unidentified
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Nice. | |
| Yikes. | ||
| That's absolutely false. | ||
| CDC numbers for this time frame around 2003-2004 were about 850,000, and the trend has consistently been heading downward ever since. | ||
| And, even at that point, it was heading downward. | ||
| Alex is exaggerating the number of abortions done each year by about five times, and not recognizing that number of procedures is decreasing as education improves and there's greater access to birth control and emergency contraception. | ||
| Alex is a liar, painting a fraudulent picture for the audience to help justify his extremist views and make them more likely to support a group like Operation Rescue West, whose senior policy advisor went to... | ||
| jail for planning to bomb a clinic and who very clearly inspired the murder of george tiller right there's not even a reason to lie here his audience doesn't understand numbers or scale so if he said 850 000 abortions were done each year they'd be just as scandalized by it this guy would still say yikes but on some level alex cannot resist the impulse to exaggerate and sensationalize everything he touches regardless of Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And just the willingness to toss out a number in an instant without thinking about it. | ||
| That's me pulling something for a bit. | ||
| Just out of nowhere. | ||
| It's just like, yeah, five million. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| You should have to have something. | ||
| If you don't know, say, hold on, let me check. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have a staff of people who could give me the exact number right now. | |
| But maybe that number does come from some... | ||
|
unidentified
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Evil anti-abortion blog kind of thing. | |
| That's possible. | ||
| They're undercounting the official statistics. | ||
| We went to this abortion place and they're... | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah, that's possible. | ||
| I wouldn't be too surprised if that number does come from somewhere, not out of thin air, but whatever it is, it is not accurate on the... | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| So we have one last clip here. | ||
| Like I said, it's a shorter episode we're going to be doing, but in this clip, Alex points the finger at everybody by describing them as himself. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| How people can't see what's right, right in front of their faces, I just... | ||
| But the society says it's okay, puts up these arguments, and you're young, and you go, oh, I can't do that. | ||
| I'm having too much fun whoring at the bars. | ||
| I'm having too much fun picking up all these women. | ||
| Yeah, I'll just give 300 bucks to her, and then I won't have to worry about it. | ||
| And then you just blasted something beautiful and wonderful that was going to take care of you when you were old. | ||
| Now you're going to be alone on Thanksgiving. | ||
| Now you're going to be alone at Christmas. | ||
| Now you're going to die alone, old, in your apartment with no children around you, with no nothing. | ||
| You just took the greatest birthright, the most amazing thing we've got, and you flushed it down the toilet. | ||
| You put it in an incinerator. | ||
| We know from so many things that he says later that that's what he did. | ||
| He's talking about himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it reminds me of every, like, youth group. | ||
| situation where they brought in the evangelical testimonial the guy who Comes in and he's like, listen, for 20 years I lived like this, and he's got tattoos and all that stuff, and then he goes, but that's not good for you. | ||
| And he continues on to explain that everyone who drinks lives like he did. | ||
| Everyone who goes to bars acts like he did. | ||
| Everybody who's around other people is trying to fuck all the time. | ||
| At no point in time is he like, well, you know, I could have also... | ||
| Gone to therapy or something? | ||
| Well, but here's the difference between Alex and that guy. | ||
| At least that guy is saying, I did all these things. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| There's no recognition in this episode or anything of Alex talking about himself and his own experience. | ||
| He's talking about his own experience, but projecting it onto everybody else. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That, to me, is even more cowardly than what you're describing in that youth pastor. | ||
| Because at least with that youth pastor, you'd be able to be, like, dismiss... | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| A little bit more, because it's like, oh, you're dealing with something here. | ||
| And he's projecting on everybody else, too, but he's telling you, I'm telling you why I'm projecting. | ||
| He's giving you the reason he's projecting on everybody else. | ||
| Yeah, whereas this is just like... | ||
| Subterfuge, almost. | ||
| Yeah, and it sucks. | ||
| So you have that dynamic, and then the dynamic of trying to launder and promote this group that is up to absolutely no good. | ||
| They have started making trouble in the neighborhood of Bel-Air. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It should be recognized, too, that George Tiller was a large name in the reproductive health scene, let's say. | ||
| He was somebody who was... | ||
| A lot of people around the country even pointed the finger at him. | ||
| And they were like, this guy sucks. | ||
| He's the worst. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| But this guy, Troy Newman, and his group... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They were agitating there. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That is a little bit more relevant. | ||
| I think it's more impactful. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| His involvement was on the ground there, inciting, harassing them, as opposed to, let's say, an anti-abortion group on the West Coast, who is still mad at Tiller, let's say, but maybe wrote a letter or something. | ||
| Thinking about this time period, what that was was a terrorist group assassinating a political enemy. | ||
| That is what you have to kind of view it as. | ||
| At least that seems to me to make the most sense. | ||
| The only reason I would push back on that is that there isn't any real evidence that the guy who killed them was actually involved with their group. | ||
| So you could say that it's kind of like that idea of the stochastic terrorist inciting someone to do the thing that they obviously want done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But don't say that that's what they want done. | ||
| You could make that argument, but characterizing them as a whole terrorist group... | ||
| The reason I'm doing that is not because I genuinely believe that they are an entire terrorist group. | ||
| I am saying simultaneous to this time period, the FBI is finding any Muslim person they can to tie together with a group. | ||
| I mean, so what I'm seeing is obvious shit of we're making terrorists and we're ignoring the ones that we like. | ||
| And that's just the case, you know? | ||
| So while I recognize, you know, like I'm not putting them on the terror watch list, obviously, you know? | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks. | ||
| It sucks? | ||
| Keep coming back to this, but there's a reason. | ||
| Because it sucks. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| Alex's behavior is shit, but I think... | ||
| You can fall into a little bit of a hole of thinking like, you know, at some point he changed. | ||
| You know, there was something, you know, he... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And like, oh, the Trump years really brought out the worst in him. | ||
| And I mean, from a performance aspect, yes, that's definitely true. | ||
| He's become far worse a broadcaster. | ||
| He's sloppy and unhinged in ways that are meant to farm attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's more of the economy at that point. | ||
| But, you know, it's important to recognize and understand that you go back as far back in his career as you can and you see behavior that is just as detestable and just as dangerous as stuff that he does regularly presently. | ||
| Yeah, I think what happens is if you only pop in and out, you know, over your life, you know, I only see these clips every, maybe I only saw a video last year and then one again. | ||
| You can mistake Decaying for change. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, I don't think Alex changed. | ||
| He just decayed. | ||
| It just got worse and worse and worse. | ||
| But not different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just worse. | ||
| I think also pivot a little bit. | ||
| I mean, in as much as, like, I think a lot of people changed strategies when social media became more relevant. | ||
| You know, the ways that you can hack people's attention. | ||
| You know, I think that that could attribute a lot to what you're describing as decay. | ||
| You know, a lot of the more frequent bombast and shit. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| One of the things in trying to prepare for this episode, I was also trying to look at other people we could talk about. | ||
| I texted you about Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles are two dudes who are both Daily Wire guys who are very on the vanguard of pretty dangerous transphobic... | ||
| The ideology of rhetoric. | ||
| And so I thought, yeah, maybe it would be a good... | ||
| I see clips of them flying around all the time on Twitter, and I thought, let me sit down and check out an episode of their show. | ||
| And it became intensely clear to me that there is a bit that's for attention and then an unwatchable show, like the rest of it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I think that there's a strategy in that. | ||
| And I think it's because of the way attention economy works. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| I think that Alex is fairly similar. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| That's just he's not allowed on social media. | ||
| We've received... | ||
| Emails from companies who do exactly that for you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, what they do is they say, we're going to help you make TikTok clips out of your large content to grow your audience. | ||
| So then, all of a sudden, you are not concerned with the large content. | ||
| You are concerned with making the TikTok clips. | ||
| Go around. | ||
| And yeah, we haven't responded. | ||
| You don't have to worry so much about the coherence and the quality of your larger product. | ||
| You have to have like, well, it's good enough what I'm doing, but there has to be something that is at least clippable enough that people will get angry or people will keep reposting this. | ||
| And I think that those strategies are absent in Alex in the past, too. | ||
| And that's maybe a large part of why I think that it's more interesting as a product. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Because I find that to be a really dumb, boring... | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| I think that, like, I don't know. | ||
| We have a vested interest in not doing that, though, since our shows are three and a half hours long from time to time. | ||
| Operating that way, I just find to be, like, the opposite of what someone who wanted to create content would do. | ||
| And I think it sucks. | ||
| Anyway, I... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not against doing an episode about someone like Matt Walsh or whatever, but his episodes are boring as hell. | ||
| Well, you know, to me, it is... | ||
| I was always working on putting together an hour. | ||
| I wanted a headline. | ||
| So I wanted to get an hour. | ||
| And it took a long time to realize that a lot of people wanted to get five minutes so they could put the clip out, get noticed, get booked for stuff, and then they'll figure out how to write jokes. | ||
| It never occurred to me to go that way. | ||
| Because that's a shortcut. | ||
| Get a good tape. | ||
| It's cheating. | ||
| Get a good little snippet of your opener. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like I would never in a million years try and get a headline gig until I was confident in 45 minutes of an hour. | ||
| Well, not anymore. | ||
| It's not how it works. | ||
| So anyway, we come to the end of this and fuck Alex in the past. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Bad dude. | ||
| We'll be back, Jordan, but until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yes, we are also on Twitter. | ||
| Indeed we are. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Yep, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo, I'm Leo, I'm DZXClark, I'm the Juiciest Ice Cube. | ||
| And now, here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |
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