Today, Dan and Jordan stick around in the past to pay off the last episode's cliffhanger about Diane Sawyer's interview with Mel Gibson and Alex's inside information about what Mel said. Alex has some strong feelings, but the question of whether or not he even watched the interview hangs heavy.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller in the future. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight, I'm Dan. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot today is this weekend was the release of Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Losing words. | ||
| The new Legend of Zelda game on the old Switch. | ||
| Got me back on the Switch after having been kind of a PS5 guy for a bit. | ||
| Getting used to that controller, jumping back to the dual sticks. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah, untethered from the wireless remotes. | ||
| I always come to love it. | ||
| This is the thing that is most important about the Zelda conversation. | ||
| I'm getting used to holding the Joy-Con. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Game of the year! | ||
| No, it's a lot of fun. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| I haven't played a ton of it. | ||
| I haven't had a chance due to various things. | ||
| One of the things that I've noticed about it is that there's a lot of similarities to Breath of the Wild. | ||
| And I think that's a good thing. | ||
| Because I think what people liked was that game. | ||
| And if you just gave us more of that, but more complicated... | ||
| And, like, sort of evolved the game a bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's complaining about that? | ||
| I don't know, some asshole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure there's some asshole who's like, oh, I wanted something worse but different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's been great so far. | ||
| I'm only, like I said, a couple hours in, so I can't speak on this as an expert. | ||
| But everything that I've encountered so far has been pretty fun. | ||
| Even the things that I, like, I was telling you before we got started, I wandered into a cave and just got wrecked. | ||
| By some enemy that I should not have gone anywhere near. | ||
| Even that was fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Multiple times I've said, ah! | ||
| Like playing this. | ||
| I gotta run away from it. | ||
| Oh no, fuck, it's a Lionel! | ||
| Gotta run! | ||
| But yeah, it's a lot of fun. | ||
| So that's definitely going to be a bright spot for a bit. | ||
| Nice! | ||
| I was wrong, too. | ||
| You were wrong. | ||
| Well, I had said that the lead-up to this game release was something I wasn't excited about, because it felt kind of like, eh, it's just another Breath of the Wild. | ||
| You did. | ||
| And I had entered with those feelings, and I was wrong. | ||
| It's far surpassed the expectations that I had. | ||
| So far. | ||
| I think that's probably why the reviews were so ecstatic, is everybody who came into it being like, I love Breath of the Wild. | ||
| I'm sure this is going to be more Breath of the Wild, but you know what? | ||
| You've got to evolve, you know, that whole thing. | ||
| And then it happened, and then everybody was like, holy shit! | ||
| Yeah, and I showed you a little bit of it, and even you were like, whoa. | ||
| I want to get in on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, that's nuts. | |
| If I hadn't just started Jedi Survivor like three or four days ago, I would be in on... | ||
| But that's the good news. | ||
| It's waiting for you. | ||
| It's ready. | ||
| It's ready and waiting for me. | ||
| Whenever you decide to dip your little toes in, it'll be there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is, well, today on Sunday when we record this, it's Mother's Day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We got my mother-in-law. | ||
| It's a busy day for your wife. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Two moms. | ||
| Two moms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we got them some flowers, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Her mom is an engineer, though. | ||
| So we got the flowers. | ||
| She was like, oh, these are beautiful flowers. | ||
| But you should see the box they came in. | ||
| I have not seen anybody put together a box like this. | ||
| Could you find out more about this box for me? | ||
| And it's like, that's the brain that I love so much. | ||
| That's an engineer brain. | ||
| Oh, who put together this box? | ||
| Listen. | ||
| I've seen flowers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen flowers my entire goddamn life. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm almost 70 years old. | ||
| I'll see flowers all day. | ||
| You're going to have to wake up pretty early in the morning to surprise me with a flower. | ||
| I have not seen a box like this before once. | ||
| That's pretty fun. | ||
| That one time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's great. | |
| What was so special about this box? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was a conversation they had. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it wasn't something that would have triggered that in your brain anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| You would have just seen a box. | ||
| I would have been like, box, throw it away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Goodbye, box. | ||
| So that's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers and so forth and so on. | ||
| You know, we do that stuff, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So today, Jordan, we have an episode to go over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| There's a little bit of business to cover here at the top of the show, though. | ||
| So first order of business. | ||
| I guess we're recording this. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure how the audio is going to sound on this because we tried to get some new equipment because we've had some sound issues. | ||
| I'm sure some people have noticed them. | ||
| There's been a little bit of crackling and then it didn't come through in the recording, but periodically our headphones would sort of frazzle out. | ||
| And so we tried to replace a number of things and then spent three hours trying to get it all to work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we are. | |
| And now we're here, and we have reverted back to most of the old equipment, except with the headphone amp replaced. | ||
| And so it seems to be working, but I don't know exactly if we have the levels dialed in and everything. | ||
| So hopefully everything will sound good and what have you. | ||
| But I'm just saying this in advance. | ||
| If there's some scurriness, that's why. | ||
| And we'll get it sorted out as we move forward. | ||
| The best part of this is, if this doesn't work... | ||
| You'll never know. | ||
| And the alternative was just to say we're punting and there's no episode and fuck it. | ||
| Not gonna happen. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Second little piece of business. | ||
| I decided to stay in the past, and so we're going to be talking about February 17th, 2004. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| And there's a couple reasons. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The first was our last 2004 episode was a cliffhanger. | ||
| True. | ||
| Because Alex was going to watch Mel Gibson on Diane Sawyer's show, and then he was going to reveal whether or not they cut out the cool things that Mel Gibson said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| The Nazis. | ||
| So if we had waited too long, this cliffhanger would have no power. | ||
| So that's one reason. | ||
| Obviously storytelling. | ||
| This is more or less a rationalization. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| This week, there was the shooting in Texas. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At the mall. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I was watching Alex's content, intending to cover this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But I found it to be disgusting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He gratuitously played the videos of people dead on the ground. | ||
| Alright, well, no. | ||
| Blood everywhere. | ||
| I didn't see them on Twitter, but I heard from a number of people that very graphic photos and videos and stuff were circulating on social media, and these were the things that Alex was playing, and it was horrific. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| And, you know, his narrative around it really isn't anything... | ||
| New. | ||
| But the potency of it, the emotional manipulation that was going into it, I don't even feel like it's something that can be covered. | ||
| It just has to be mentioned and condemned. | ||
| I can't cover him playing... | ||
| I don't know, Faces of Death video on his show? | ||
| Like, that's disgusting. | ||
| I've nearly thrown up before, based upon the disgusting shit that we have experienced, and that is further than Wave Gone. | ||
| Yeah, and he was basically saying that that was part of... | ||
| The cartels starting a war in America and such. | ||
| And he had his whole, like, all kinds of secret intelligence that is just made up shit that he's coming up with. | ||
| It just wasn't worth it. | ||
| And I found just the going through it was not fun. | ||
| And I didn't think it could be made into an episode. | ||
| There was anything other than kind of... | ||
| Look at how gross this is. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I felt like in the opposite direction, our last episode where we talked to Erica Lafferty was a very emotional episode for a lot of people. | ||
| There was a lot of feelings that were brought up, many of them positive, many of them reflective of the ability for someone to persevere. | ||
| I didn't necessarily want two super heavy episodes in a row. | ||
| That's a one-two punch. | ||
| So there's a lot of reasons why I was like, fuck this noise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But I will say, I think the main one is his gore... | ||
| I mean, you know I can't handle that. | ||
| You're doing this for me. | ||
| Here's your rationalization. | ||
| That's a part of it. | ||
| You're saving my life. | ||
| There's your rationalization, Dan. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons, but let's add that to the pile. | ||
| Let's put it on there. | ||
| So we're going to be in 2004, and we're going to find out what happened with Diane Sawyer's interview, which I watched. | ||
| But first, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| So first, dear Brad, I'm addicted to knowledge fight and it's all your fault. | ||
| Best paralegal ever from Mara. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Could be Mara. | ||
| M-A-R-A? | ||
| Could be Mara. | ||
| Mara. | ||
| I feel like Mara's the more common... | ||
| Moro. | ||
| Moro. | ||
| Rob Moro. | ||
| Rob Moro. | ||
| The guy from... | ||
| Del Toro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Next, the prophecy is being realized. | ||
| Be afraid. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| The prophecy that I would bring up northern exposure on the show. | ||
| I loved that show. | ||
| Five years. | ||
| Might not hold up, but loved that show. | ||
| You did. | ||
| So good. | ||
| Wanted to live out there. | ||
| Up north. | ||
| They made it look so nice. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Simple, small town. | ||
| Next, six-armed sweater. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, doing my part to dismantle conservative America by mainlining podcasts and leaving comments on YouTube videos. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And cannibalistic, humanoid, underground, democratic socialist. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And we got a technocrat in the mix. | ||
| So thank you so much to Matt, but not Matt Baker, or is it? | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| I have risen above my enemies. | ||
| I might quit tomorrow, actually. | ||
| I'm just going to take a little breaky now. | ||
| A little breaky for me. | ||
| And then we're going to come back. | ||
| And I'm going to start the show over. | ||
| But I'm the devil! | ||
| I've got to be taken over here! | ||
| I've been all this... | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| I got plenty of words for you, but at the end of the day, fuck you and your New World Order, and fuck the horse you rode in on, and all your shit! | ||
| Maybe today should be my last broadcast. | ||
| Maybe I'll just be gone a month, maybe five years. | ||
| Maybe I'll walk out of here tomorrow, and you never see me again. | ||
| That's really what I want to do. | ||
| I never want to come back here again. | ||
| I apologize to the crew and the listeners yesterday that I was legitimately having breakdowns on air. | ||
| I'll be better tomorrow. | ||
| No. | ||
| But was Diane Sawyer? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't remember Diane Sawyer. | ||
| I'm just now realizing that I don't really know much about Diane Sawyer at all. | ||
| She had a show. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Did a lot of news programs. | ||
| All right. | ||
| At this point, ABC, primetime. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Did some hour-long interviews. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Like this one. | ||
| Like this one with Mel Gibson. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But it's a piece where Mel Gibson is being interviewed, and then a lot of other people are chiming in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| About, you know, why is there a controversy surrounding this? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Passion of the Christ. | ||
| So it's almost like a mini-documentary with, like, a cut... | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| All right, okay. | ||
| So we don't need to wait very long. | ||
| For Alex to get into his thoughts about Diane Sawyer's interview. | ||
| Let's hear it. | ||
| But the first thing I'm going to cover when we get back is primetime with Diane Sawyer last night. | ||
| When we get back, I'll go over it. | ||
| I got very angry. | ||
| Something I've been doing more and more these days. | ||
| When I got home at about midnight, my wife had recorded it for me. | ||
| And so I sat down and watched the interview with Mel Gibson, and I've got some comments on this when I get back. | ||
| I've got some very serious comments about Mr. Foxman and others who are a pack of liars. | ||
| Damn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So I watched this hour-long interview that Sawyer did with Mel Gibson, and it's about what you'd expect. | ||
| She's asking him questions about the movie, and then she has some religious experts on to discuss some of the reasons that people are concerned about the film. | ||
| The head of the ADL is interviewed, and he explicitly says that he doesn't think Gibson is anti-Semitic, nor is the film necessarily anti-Semitic, but it has the potential to inflame anti-Semitic feelings, particularly surrounding the idea that Jewish people, including those alive today, bear a responsibility for killing Jesus. | ||
| Gibson does also directly say that he believes there's a Uh-huh. | ||
| Shouldn't need to be asked, but it really was! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He says yes, in a roundabout way. | |
| It's not convincing. | ||
| Nah, it's convincing. | ||
| I do appreciate the head of the ADL in 2004 whiffing twice. | ||
| I don't think Mel is anti-Semitic. | ||
| Whiff! | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| You gotta consider the time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is before a lot of the other stuff that Mel Gibson... | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| No, no, this is back in the time where you gave people the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| Right, and just because his dad... | ||
| ...is such does not mean he is. | ||
| It calls for concern a little bit. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| But, you know, there's Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL at this point, is being very generous, being quite fair with his portrayal. | ||
| Very, very generous. | ||
| So overall, this wasn't great. | ||
| But it also wasn't too bad. | ||
| It helps provide some explanation for the reasons that some groups were offended by various aspects of the movie, while at the same time it doesn't hold Mel's feet to the fire about how his dad's a giant anti-Semite who hates the Catholic Church because they reject the idea that Jews are guilty of deicide, and how his new movie really gives the impression that Jews are guilty of deicide. | ||
| Sawyer really let that line of inquiry drop pretty easily, and I think that could have been pressed on a little bit more, because... | ||
| You know, just because your dad has a noxious belief doesn't mean that you do as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| However, when your dad's horrible, noxious belief is tied to some religious belief, and you share that religious belief, it leads to the question of, do you also share that noxious belief that is connected to your dad's religious belief, which you do share? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's... | ||
| I would have liked a little bit more assessment of that, but he gets so mad when she's asking about his dad. | ||
| Diane, you gotta drop it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| See, that's crazy to me. | ||
| I mean, but that's TV journalism, you know? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Here's what you see. | ||
| Even watching it, it made me uncomfortable. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, you look at that and you see somebody who's right on the cusp of a you-can't-handle-the-truth monologue where he reveals that he hates all the Jews. | ||
| You give him that rope! | ||
| You let him go! | ||
| Excuse me, I'm sorry, are you telling me to drop this? | ||
| Why do you want me to drop this, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please continue on until eventually he's like, yes, the Jews killed Christ! | |
| Frost Nixon would not have been Frost Nixon if there hadn't been... | ||
| Push. | ||
| There's some pushing on it. | ||
| You gotta push on it, man. | ||
| Yeah, I think she let it go a little bit too easily, but I guess, I mean, like, I got the sense from watching it that, like, he probably would have left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I mean, that says all you need to know! | ||
| I guess. | ||
| You know, because here's the problem. | ||
| It's centered around, like, you're trying to make me disown my dad. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| There's a lot of ways that Mel could leave and play it with, like, a... | ||
| That's not evidence that I have anti-Semitic beliefs. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| It would play to whoever it plays to, and it wouldn't to whoever doesn't want to accept it. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So anyway, Alex watched this interview. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Or did he? | ||
| I'm unclear. | ||
| Last night I went and worked on a film that I'm putting together and at about midnight I got home and my wife had taped Primetime with Diane Sawyer for me because Mel Gibson was on the show and I wanted to see what they tried to say about the passion and what his response was. | ||
| And my wife had just let the... | ||
| The tape runs, so I had two hours of shows on there. | ||
| And so I just hit rewind and sat down and started waiting for it to conclude its rewinding. | ||
| And I got impatient and hit play, and it stopped on Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, which is really the defamation league of freedom. | ||
| And it stopped on Mr. Foxman and saying how scary the film was and how scary it was that these Christians were crying and everybody was so silent after he snuck into a screening of it. | ||
| And Mrs. CFR Diane Sawyer said to him, she said, well, is Mel Gibson anti-Semitic? | ||
| Is this film anti-Semitic? | ||
| And he said, no, it's not, but it's still dangerous. | ||
| The point that Foxman was making was that the film is super emotionally powerful. | ||
| It's just one long torture scene, basically, and it's very hard to sit through something like that and not have it make some kind of impact. | ||
| When there's a discussion of the movie being scary, it's because of the history of passion plays and how they've been used in the past to target Jewish populations. | ||
| One of the experts they talked to also made the point that there are aspects of how things are presented in the movie that will be experienced very differently by a viewer who has experienced Yeah. | ||
| You gotta understand where people are coming from, you know, a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| There's context. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All in all, I think it's a fairly fair piece. | ||
| If anything, it's way too easy on Mel, and too unwilling to make more direct statements, particularly about his dad. | ||
| I can't help but feel like the tone would have been a bit different had this been, like, after 2006, which is when Mel got caught drunk driving and yelled at the cop about how Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And asked if she was a Jew and all this stuff. | |
| In the now we live in, it seems very easy to go back into the 2004 and be like, do you see how he's doing the stuff? | ||
| And then go back to 2006 and be like, I told you so. | ||
| And then go back to now and be like, why didn't we do anything about that? | ||
| He's going to direct the next movie that wins an Oscar or whatever it is. | ||
| We're doing great! | ||
| Daddy's home, too. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Like, what are we doing? | ||
| Someone do something! | ||
| It is weird, because I can understand why people are a little bit reticent to make, like, full, like, accusations or whatever. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| But we live past 2006, so we can see, like... | ||
| Maybe you should have. | ||
| You should have done it. | ||
| You should have gone with maybe we know in advance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex talked to Mel Gibson's dad. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he had some inside info about what happened in the piece. | ||
| And, man, they fucked up. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| And I talked to Hutton a few days ago before this aired, Mel Gibson's father, who's, again, just an expert on the New World Order. | ||
| We really respect his opinion on this. | ||
| And he said, well, I don't want you to talk about this on air until after it airs. | ||
| After it does, you know, you're welcome to. | ||
| They interviewed Mel for three and a half hours, and then ended up, I guess, about 12, 15 minutes, I didn't time it out, where Mel's actually talking on the screen. | ||
| And he did a great job. | ||
| I mean, most people, if they talk for three and a half hours, the news media's going to find something damning to use against them, but they were unable to do that in this interview. | ||
| Were they? | ||
| But Hutton told me that Mel told him that he said, you know, when this comes out, I think I'm just going to go hide somewhere because of all the heat that's been on me, and I think I'm going to hide somewhere where nobody can find me. | ||
| I think I'm going to pitch a tent next to the weapons of mass destruction, wherever they are. | ||
| And, you know, I predicted on the show yesterday, without stealing Mel Gibson's lines, that that would never be in the piece. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| They fucked up. | ||
| They cut this out. | ||
| And then Hutton had given Alex the inside info so he can bring it out and be like, you're too afraid. | ||
| Unfortunately, that joke was in the piece. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But what about Mel Gibson's superstar, the box office lethal weapon? | |
| Can you go back to making those films after this? | ||
| You know, I just, I'm kind of, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't feel like I want to. | ||
| I don't feel like I want to get in front of a camera anymore. | ||
| I like getting... | ||
| Cut to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just being a slob behind a camera and watching other people look good. | |
| You know, I might not hurry back. | ||
| I might go and go somewhere no one can find me. | ||
| You know where that is? | ||
| You know where's the place that no one can find you? | ||
| I was thinking of pitching my tent right next to the weapons of mass destruction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Then no one would find me. | |
| In the meantime, the film continues to generate a kind of natural conversation with people from all sides weighing in in sometimes surprising ways. | ||
| Yeah, so man, they cut that out. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| I wish they would. | ||
| If I was Mel, I'd have been like, could you please cut that out? | ||
| I have two thoughts about this. | ||
| The first is Alex clearly hasn't seen this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He didn't watch the whole thing. | ||
| No, he said he didn't watch the whole thing. | ||
| He maybe watched a couple minutes of it. | ||
| He said he paused because he got... | ||
| Bored. | ||
| He got tired of rewinding. | ||
| Bored of rewinding. | ||
| But there's still an implication that he went back and watched the whole thing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because he's covering it and he has strong opinions about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| He implies that. | ||
| And he's making a direct claim that something got cut out of it that was in the piece. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, whatever. | ||
| Evidence is iffy that he watched it. | ||
| We're going to find out later that he definitely didn't watch it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Bye. | ||
| He's still at the beginning of the show pretending that he had. | ||
| The other thing I'm thinking about, though, is that at this time, there was a really strong feeling that that would be a good bet to make, that they would cut that out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there was such a weird feeling about dissenting against the war. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| Yeah, we all saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks and we were all like, oh, they silenced us. | ||
| It's understandable to have a feeling that Diane Sawyer would never allow that in the piece. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so I understand where Alex is coming from in his prediction. | ||
| I think that he should have confirmed whether or not his prediction was correct before he celebrated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Boy, I feel like at that time period it goes the opposite direction. | ||
| I feel like they were more willing to cut things out that made people look ugly back then than they are now. | ||
| Because now, think about all the times that they're like, oh, footage unearthed from blah blah blah with this person saying the N-word 300 times to their mom or whatever it is. | ||
| That's probably on every editor's tape. | ||
| For the past 30 years from some asshole, and they just delete it, and they're like, oh, well, we can't use it because then we won't have access to this guy anymore. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Now, that is almost certainly true. | ||
| But also... | ||
| Well, maybe not everybody, but a lot of folks. | ||
| But the aspect of critiquing the war in this way and saying there's no weapons of mass destruction, they'll never find me there, or whatever. | ||
| Cutting that out might make him look better in as much as you could see some kind of a blowback from that, some sort of a career consequence. | ||
| Leaving it in is... | ||
| I mean, it's not like a brave move necessarily, but it is at least mildly risky. | ||
| Yeah, I would say so. | ||
| And so I get this, but I just don't get Alex going on air and talking about this shit without having watched the thing. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just, that's not even laziness. | ||
| That's insanity. | ||
| You know, that's not, I wish it, laziness is like skimming through it at like three times speed. | ||
| You know, like. | ||
| I'll listen to... | ||
| It's rude. | ||
| This is just insane. | ||
| So, Alex, the part that he's clearly seen is this part that has Foxman, the head of the ADL, in it. | ||
| And so he's decided that the narrative is that Foxman is backing off. | ||
| He's made all kinds of rampant accusations and screamed about how Mel Gibson's an anti-Semite, and now he's backing off because he realized that his plot didn't work. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So, if I understand correctly, this documentary about how the film might be anti-Semitic is responded to by Alex in a way such as singling out the only Semitic person there and being strongly anti. | ||
| I mean, yeah, the only reason I'm pausing slightly is I think there might have been another Jewish scholar who was interviewed. | ||
| But yeah, basically. | ||
| Essentially. | ||
| Now, why is the ADL backing off now, and why is the Simon Wiesenthal Center backing off demonizing the passion? | ||
| Because their lives didn't work. | ||
| It blew up in their face. | ||
| Mel Gibson traveled this country from end to end, screening the film to hundreds of large crowds. | ||
| And when people went and saw it, Paul Harvey and others went to see it. | ||
| They said, I don't get it. | ||
| I don't understand how this is anti-cemented. | ||
| In fact, the ADL has now injected that into the debate where if somebody watches it, that's all they're going to be thinking about now. | ||
| In fact, the ADL has actually created an overall dislike of Jews. | ||
| So if anybody... | ||
| Is hurting Jews? | ||
| I'd have to say it's the ADL. | ||
| Calm down, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Save that for your private conversations with Hutton. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| I like that twisting. | ||
| I like twisting things around until you get to the point where, ah, see, the only person who's really hurting slaves, all these slaves! | ||
| Especially the people who are enslaved who are complaining about it. | ||
| Oh my god, they're the ones who make me do terrible things to them. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| Why are they making me do such bad things? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's the same kind of lines that some of the JBS, John Birch Society folks had during the civil rights time. | ||
| It's like, these people who are pointing out inequalities are making white people racist. | ||
| They're the ones who are making us be more unequal. | ||
| Our dream is to be as equal as possible. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Number one thing we love to do. | ||
| But when you point us out that we're not... | ||
| It just makes us want to add more. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not crazy. | ||
| That's whiteness. | ||
| It's very common as a trend throughout his thought. | ||
| It does seem to be that way. | ||
| So, Alex, like I said, he didn't watch this whole thing. | ||
| For sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I made a good point in the piece, one of the pastors they were interviewing, that when Christians see a cross in major surveys, they feel love and compassion and Christ's sacrifice. | ||
| And that when they, quote, interview Jews and they see a cross, they feel threatened and that it's, you know, this bad symbol. | ||
| And that's ridiculous. | ||
| Also, Mrs. Council on Foreign Relations, member Diane Sawyer, Mrs. Anti-Gun, who's been caught, you know, putting out all these stilted and manipulated news pieces, she said, well, what about Hitler? | ||
| You know, he... | ||
| He said passion plays were very useful to, you know, show that Jews are bad. | ||
| Mel Gibson came back with the best answer. | ||
| He's so smart. | ||
| He said Hitler was an occultist. | ||
| Hitler was a devil worshiper. | ||
| You know, that's what I say to people who call into this show and like Hitler. | ||
| Hitler was a devil worshiper. | ||
| That's your problem? | ||
| Hitler was part of the Fool Society. | ||
| Hitler was part of these shell and bones organizations that were founded in Germany. | ||
| That's the facts. | ||
| And 99% of people you talk to don't know that about Hitler. | ||
| In fact, the ADL and others prance around. | ||
| It's what we don't know about Hitler. | ||
| An example of Christianity targeting Jews. | ||
| And I resent that. | ||
| I resent them saying a devil worshiper represents Christians. | ||
| Adolf Hitler was an occultist. | ||
| So, whatever you want to say about Hitler's specific religious inclinations, that's an argument for another day. | ||
| Neither Diane Sawyer nor anyone in this piece said that Hitler was an example of a Christian. | ||
| They just said that Hitler believed that passion plays were a useful tool in creating hatred against Jewish people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Alex is responding to a point that no one made, because his ability to respond to this piece at all relies on that. | ||
| Also, it's painfully obvious that Alex didn't watch the whole thing. | ||
| He thinks they cut out Mel's WMD zinger, and all the specific things he's mentioning are all from around the same five minutes in the middle I was going to say, that sounds exactly right. | ||
| That sounds exactly right. | ||
| The reason that some Jewish people expressed a negative feeling towards seeing a cross is because of that history of being accused of deicide and the atrocities that have been carried out against Jewish people using that accusation as justification. | ||
| Like, it's not something that is universal, but it's something that some Jewish people who were talked to and, you know, involved in responding. | ||
| I got some crazy news for you, but throughout history... | ||
| A lot of people were not stoked to see the cross on other people walking towards them. | ||
| Not stoked about it. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| They were like, that's not good. | ||
| Those people are murderers. | ||
| Those people wearing that cross murder people. | ||
| Crusades had some negative signifying with the cross. | ||
| Oh boy, talk about your evangelists, your missionaries and the like. | ||
| Not a lot of people like those guys walking around with crosses. | ||
| You can understand some context to negative associations around this. | ||
| symbol without a hatred of the religion itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is possible for those to be discrete things. | |
| So it's interesting to me to see how little Alex cares about preparing for his job, even at this point in his career. | ||
| I always like to imagine that he was a real hard worker in these earlier days when he got lazy later. | ||
| Right! | ||
| But he can't even be bothered to watch an hour-long ABC interview before he spends a sizable chunk of his show complaining about it and using it to argue that the ADL is responsible for making anti-Semitism worse. | ||
| You know, I think our... | ||
| Here's the thing, our investigation... | ||
| Okay, you know, we've done 2015 investigations. | ||
| We've done all that. | ||
| We've done investigations, right? | ||
| This one doesn't seem like there's an investigation element to it. | ||
| We're learning. | ||
| What we're learning, though, is that I think naturally a lot of people, me included, thought... | ||
| We're watching a decline. | ||
| We're seeing him go from where he is now, and then we're going to go back up to where he started from. | ||
| He was just at the same spot the whole time! | ||
| Well, here's what I think. | ||
| Here's the thought that I'm coming around to. | ||
| I think that you're right, but there's an aesthetic decline. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That, I think, is a... | ||
| He has some traits that change. | ||
| They definitely appear much more different. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| He is all on... | ||
| Well, I mean, that's just like age, though, you know? | ||
| On speed. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I'm slower than I was when I was a young 25-year-old or whatever it is. | ||
| I'm saying he was faster later because he was doing drugs. | ||
| Oh, well, he did do a lot of drugs later. | ||
| That's definitely true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| There's the sloppiness of clear progression of alcoholism. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely true. | ||
| There's those things, but some of that is kind of aesthetic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, here's... | ||
| Here's the other thing. | ||
| I think that there is a big decline from like 2008, 2009 times, which is another period that we've watched, to present. | ||
| But I think it's a parabola. | ||
| I think he's kind of... | ||
| So we're in the upward ride right now. | ||
| I think he's similar in this 2003-2004 to more present time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But there was an attempt to make yourself look a little bit less of a horrible, toxic figure in those times. | ||
| Because that was around when he was getting a bit more media attention. | ||
| There was more of a mainstreaming that came along with the tea party. | ||
| I don't know this to be true for sure, but the episodes in 2009 and that time period that I've listened to, that's where the impression, I think, of the decline comes from. | ||
| I think he might have shaved and was putting on a little bit more of a professional face around that point. | ||
| So now he's in the minors. | ||
| Gets called up to Tea Party era. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Has his cup of coffee, and then after he gets that contract, just lets it go, gains a lot of weight, starts doing too many drugs. | ||
| But he spent his money that he got during that time to buy the team. | ||
| I mean, it did. | ||
| It was a smart move. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's a player manager who can't pitch. | ||
| He's like, pencil me in for every single game. | ||
| That's kind of how it feels. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| So Alex has not watched this interview, but he has some important things to say about it, about how they cut out everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So if you want to talk about the primetime piece, you're welcome to. | ||
| But notice that a lot of what Mel Gibson had to say that was really important didn't make it into the cut. | ||
| We'll be right back, folks. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| He didn't watch it! | ||
| He didn't watch it. | ||
| He's making these declarative statements about things that they cut out. | ||
| They cut out all the important stuff. | ||
| He doesn't know that. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| It's not important whether or not anything Mel Gibson said was cut out or not. | ||
| The reality is immaterial. | ||
| There's a party line for Alex and his ilk, and it resonates with the emotional reality that the audience has. | ||
| It feels true that they cut out all the important stuff at the interview, and so that's what Alex is reporting to them. | ||
| It really is the definition of telling the audience what they want to hear, and Alex knows what the audience wants well enough that he doesn't even have to watch the show to tell you that the shit was cut out. | ||
| That's the narrative he was going to run with before his wife hit record on the VCR. | ||
| That was always going to be the thing. | ||
| And if they didn't cut stuff out, then his inside information from Hutton Gibson is meaningless. | ||
| It was in the thing. | ||
| They have to cut stuff out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's no payoff to that otherwise. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And not just that. | ||
| I mean, and cutting stuff out is the perfect thing. | ||
| They didn't cut that out. | ||
| The thing that you said they didn't cut out? | ||
| Oh, well, I forgot that part. | ||
| But their stuff you didn't see that they cut out is an unprovable, you know, like, oh, okay. | ||
| Well, then let's go get the full three and a half hour tape, Alex. | ||
| Well, here's where things get fun with that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because Alex goes to break. | ||
| And immediately, here we go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I don't know what I'd do without my wife. | ||
| She called me during the break and said, honey, I didn't take the entire primetime piece. | ||
| I guess a few minutes of it, VCR was... | ||
| They did leave the quote in about the weapons of mass destruction, which I couldn't imagine how they wouldn't, so I guess I was wrong when I predicted they wouldn't. | ||
| Out of three and a half hours of an interview, only 15 minutes of it or so, I mean, what an amazing quote that Mel Gibson was going to hide out. | ||
| In a tent next to the weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| What an amazing quote. | ||
| After this movie comes out. | ||
| And that quote was in there. | ||
| Now, of course, I don't have it on tape. | ||
| I have mostly on tape. | ||
| Hopefully, if somebody's got it, you'll send it to me. | ||
| Yeah, someone's going to need to send that in. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So, apparently, his wife didn't record the whole thing. | ||
| And Alex didn't realize that somehow, which is weird. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| This is more suspicious. | ||
| Now, wouldn't she have told him that sometime before right now when he's on air? | ||
| How did he get impatient waiting for the tape to rewind if there was only like five minutes of the show recorded? | ||
| None of this makes sense. | ||
| I'd love to get to the bottom of this, but I suspect there's no hope. | ||
| My guess is that someone at the office, maybe even his wife, pointed out that he was completely wrong about the WMD joke, and now he has to try and cover his ass before callers confront him about it, which is what would happen. | ||
| So he just comes up with this baffling story about his wife's recording habits. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bananas. | |
| This makes no sense. | ||
| I don't believe this. | ||
| What human beings behave like this? | ||
| All we're doing is watching... | ||
| I need to understand this. | ||
| We are talking about, all we're talking about is watching a pre-recorded segment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| He's trying to watch an hour-long ABC primetime Diane Sawyer video, and it's a mystery. | ||
| And it's turned into a comedy of errors. | ||
| I'm baffled. | ||
| All you have to do is watch the tape. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That would have been the easiest thing to do. | ||
| But he didn't do that. | ||
| No, he didn't do that. | ||
| But he thinks he did it. | ||
| I don't know if that's okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| How could he possibly have thought that he watched the whole thing? | ||
| You know those primetime ABC things? | ||
| They're like those overly produced... | ||
| When they're going to break, they're like, when we come back. | ||
| If it cut off in the middle of a commercial, or before they went to break, you would know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| If it cut off... | ||
| In the middle of a segment, you'd be like, hey, that was weird. | ||
| It caught off. | ||
| This makes no sense. | ||
| None. | ||
| None. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| There's no explanation that isn't just, I didn't watch it. | ||
| The idea that his wife called and said that makes no sense either. | ||
| Why is she listening to it? | ||
| Does she listen to him every day? | ||
| She works for him at this point. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| She's like his webmaster and all that stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, like, come on. | ||
| She probably listened some. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's bleak. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So anyway, take some calls. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And one of the callers wants to complain about the interview, and it's so dumb. | ||
| Alex hasn't seen it. | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| Let's talk to Gary in Ohio. | ||
| Gary, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Alex. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, a couple of quick thoughts on the interview last night. | |
| I watched the piece. | ||
| I was actually very pleased with the results. | ||
| I was surprised. | ||
| I noticed that Diane Sawyer, I swear, she kept baiting him with these kinds of questions. | ||
| I get things about Hitler and all that. | ||
| I feel like that's not uncommon for you, sir. | ||
| Well, they were, and it was an attempt to try to trap him, and I think that she failed miserably. | ||
| How do you know that? | ||
| You didn't watch it! | ||
| You didn't watch any of it! | ||
| I think she failed miserably. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And she was so disingenuous trying to trap him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You watched three minutes of this thing. | ||
| She was laying traps. | ||
| That's why I turned it off. | ||
| I was like, Jesus, there's too many traps. | ||
| He watched three minutes, got mad at the head of the ADL, and then turned it off and grabbed a bottle of whiskey or something. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that does seem like the mystery solved. | ||
| That seems more like the... | ||
| No, you're so wrong. | ||
| This mystery goes so much deeper. | ||
| I think we just had all the endings of Clue wrapped up in one right there. | ||
| No, no, because there's going to be a twist later that you don't see coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But yeah, man, everybody loves it. | ||
| Everybody loved that interview. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Alex, again... | ||
| Except for whenever the women talk. | ||
| That was a problem for that guy. | ||
| And I don't like the person asking questions in this interview. | ||
| Weird! | ||
| But they love the Weapons of Mass Destruction line. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| Let's talk to Roger in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Roger, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Alex. | |
| That was such a superbly funny line. | ||
| Well, just to make sure I've never found. | ||
| Touché, Mel. | ||
| I wish I had that on tape, because obviously... | ||
| You should! | ||
| I watched it and didn't see that. | ||
| I'm glad that I'm wrong, because I predicted. | ||
| I didn't make a prediction. | ||
| I said, she probably won't put that in there. | ||
| But they did. | ||
| Why do you think they did that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, who knows? | |
| Yeah, who knows? | ||
| Let's move along. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who knows? | |
| I like that answer. | ||
| That is the best answer I've heard. | ||
| Oh, maybe because our worldview is stupid and wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| We're crazy. | ||
| Let's move on. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| I believe Alex called it a prediction earlier in the show. | ||
| Earlier in the show. | ||
| But yeah, I'm going to walk that back since I was super wrong. | ||
| Since I was so wrong, I wouldn't call it a prediction. | ||
| I would call it a bet. | ||
| I made a bad bet. | ||
| So, like I mentioned, Alex wants to make this all about Foxman, the head of the ADL. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And so here's him doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I noticed she didn't add to that panel any orthodox scholars from any faith. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be anathema to her purpose. | |
| What did you think of Foxman? | ||
| I mean, he's normally pretty aggressive. | ||
| He looked like a deer in the headlights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm glad you brought that up, because I think basically the reason he backed off is now, finally that the movie has come out, he better shut up, because he's going to lose even his milquetoast liberal Jewish supporters, because they'll see he's the full of it if he doesn't... | |
| Conveniently forget what he said just a few months ago. | ||
| I mean, that's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's it. | |
| It's easy for the FBI or the Southern Poverty Law Center or the ADL to demonize some little-known person and to persecute them and lie about them. | ||
| But they went up against Mel Gibson. | ||
| Mel Gibson went coast to coast, showed the film, and Jews, Gentiles, you name it, saw it and said, what is the big deal? | ||
| Why are they saying this? | ||
| So Foxman has really blown his foot off. | ||
| I mean, he went coast to coast showing the film as a promotional thing because he didn't have a distribution deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they were specifically targeting evangelical churches and religious groups. | ||
| It's a marketing plan. | ||
| Yeah, that was the idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So great. | ||
| Anyway, Alex's entire angle on the story is that Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, is doing an about-face in this interview because Alex watched a couple of minutes where Foxman said that he doesn't think that Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic, which is a turnaround. | ||
| Alex believes that he's seen Foxman call Gibson and his movie anti-Semitic in the past, so this is a softening of his position. | ||
| In reality, Foxman hadn't said those things, but Alex constructed narratives where criticism of Gibson and the plans for this movie were reported as attacks on Gibson and accusations that he's anti-Semitic. | ||
| Alex has built a storyline out of his fantasies that does not really connect to reality. | ||
| Foxman and plenty of other religious experts were very concerned about how the plan that Gibson had for this movie would turn out. | ||
| Gibson's dad was no secret, nor was the fact that Mel himself was a member of the breakaway branch of Catholicism that denies the Vatican's legitimacy since the Second Amendment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Foxman... | ||
| ... | ||
| to read a script in advance, and they were super concerned that it seemed like the movie was setting out to make the Jewish people the primary antagonists in the film, with the Romans just Kind of being there and having their hands tied by Jewish influence. | ||
| Hey, we're white. | ||
| What are we going to do, hurt people? | ||
| Also, people were really not thrilled with the scene in the early version of the film where the high priest Caiaphas says, quote, His blood be on us and our children. | ||
| Which is a line from Matthew that's been used historically to hurl accusations of deicide on all people of Jewish ancestry to the present day. | ||
| Boy, you can just change that. | ||
| That line was cut from the film. | ||
| And an associate of Gibson told the New York Times, quote, it didn't work in the focus screenings. | ||
| Maybe it was thought to be too hurtful or taken not in the way that it was intended. | ||
| It has been used terribly over the years. | ||
| It's kind of fun that Mel Gibson was so obsessed with pointing out that, you know, he's making the most accurate portrayal of the passion and yet he was swayed by focus screenings. | ||
| A little ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it is. | ||
| That is an interesting point. | ||
| If you can take it out of the movie, you should be able to take it out of the book. | ||
| I think there should be a novelization of the Bible based upon the movies made of the Bible. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| If that were the standard, then you could set out to make a Bible movie and just make it wacky. | ||
| Oh, hell yeah, I could. | ||
| And then now you're going to demand that the Bible be changed. | ||
| I don't see any change from any other religious behavior. | ||
| Look. | ||
| I don't want to get in the weeds on this. | ||
| My point just is that Mel Gibson was like, one of the biggest things that he was saying was like, hey, you don't have a problem with me. | ||
| You have a problem with the Bible. | ||
| You know, like that kind of stuff. | ||
| Like I'm being just so accurate to the Bible. | ||
| And, you know, there's clearly they were doing focus screenings. | ||
| So go fuck yourself. | ||
| But then second, like, what is accuracy? | ||
| Is context necessary? | ||
| If you are really just using the Gospels and not external context and historical information, then you're not really being accurate. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, but in his point of view, in his mind, he is telling you the accurate story. | ||
| Because the Bible is the revealed word of God, which means it's true, and the other context around it is people lying. | ||
| Because they're the devil. | ||
| Yeah, but he's also, like, using other stuff that he's pretending not to use. | ||
| Well, sure, I mean, you can't use that, obviously. | ||
| Now, I used it, but you can't use that. | ||
| Right, like, there's the, like, revelations of this nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich. | ||
| Well, sure, but that wasn't in the Bible because they forgot to add it. | ||
| That's not why. | ||
| But he was very swayed by her visions of the passion. | ||
| One of the articles that I was reading points out that there's at least one example of something in the movie that is directly from those visions as opposed to being biblical. | ||
| And so there's also kind of... | ||
| Anti-Semitic leanings on Emmerich's part. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Anyway, one thing that Foxman did say was, quote, not in the interview with Sawyer. | ||
| This is something that he had said previously. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He said, quote, recent statements by Mel Gibson paint the portrait of an anti-Semite. | ||
| This is sort of calling him an anti-Semite, but it's kind of artful in a way that it's not really calling him one. | ||
| It's just these actions are those that an anti-Semite would make. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a skip away from if it looks like a duck, you know? | ||
| Like, it's the same fucking thing. | ||
| This wasn't about the movie, though. | ||
| This was about some comments that Mel had made towards the end of 2003. | ||
| Peter Boyle of The New Yorker went to a rough-cut screening of The Passion and then spent some time with Mel, and some of the stuff he was saying wasn't great. | ||
| For instance, Gibson was talking about that cutscene of Caiaphas and said, quote, I wanted it in. | ||
| My brother said I was wimping out if I didn't include it. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| It was said. | ||
| But man, if I included it in there, they'd be coming after me at my house. | ||
| They'd kill me. | ||
| Boyle makes it very clear in the article that the they Gibson is referring to are the people at the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center who had criticized him previously. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| At another point, Gibson got mad that someone on CNN mentioned his father and said, quote, I don't want to be dissing my father. | ||
| He never denied the Holocaust. | ||
| He just said there were fewer than six million. | ||
| I don't want to have them dissing my father. | ||
| I mean, he's my father. | ||
| I don't know about you, but if my father made a practice of going around in the media and downplaying the Holocaust, I don't think I'd mind people dissing him. | ||
| Oh, I'd diss the shit out of my Holocaust-denying father. | ||
| Do you know what he does? | ||
| He denies the Holocaust. | ||
| I do not get to not diss him unless I think he's got a point. | ||
| I think that so many people are like, you know, the blood tie, though you can't condemn your father even if you think that his ideas are horrible. | ||
| Fuck that noise! | ||
| You can't deny the Holocaust! | ||
| You can't deny the Holocaust! | ||
| My brother, I'm with you. | ||
| It's just not complicated. | ||
| I agree with you, but I think that there are some people... | ||
| Who would be like, oh, it's so complicated. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| That's how you get a little bit of the free pass that Gibson gets at this point. | ||
| I get into trouble a lot. | ||
| People are like, oh, Jordan, you don't focus on the shades of gray. | ||
| Now, sometimes I think that's the opposite. | ||
| There's 50 of them. | ||
| Sometimes things are very black and white and we overcomplicate them. | ||
| Like, for instance, you can't deny the Holocaust. | ||
| Black and white. | ||
| No complications. | ||
| None. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even if you're my dad. | ||
| Even if you're my fucking dad, man! | ||
| So up till this point, before he'd said that this paints the portrait, Foxman had been pretty clear that he didn't think Gibson or the film was anti-Semitic, but that it was, quote, insensitive. | ||
| After that New Yorker piece, Foxman said that his comments painted the portrait of an anti-Semite, which isn't really the same, but, you know, there's no huge change, of course, for Foxman, but Alex needs there to be for some kind of a narrative to stick. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That, like, Mel Gibson has risen above. | ||
| You need to have some sort of... | ||
| There needs to be a plot element happening. | ||
| When in reality, the criticism has been largely the same. | ||
| The exact same thing the whole time. | ||
| So I told you there'd be a twist with our mystery about Alex not watching this. | ||
| Mr. Body isn't dead at all. | ||
| We maybe should be concerned not about Mr. Body, but Alex's body. | ||
| Alright, my friends. | ||
| Already into the second hour. | ||
| Of this global transmission against tyranny. | ||
| I rarely get sick, but it's my excuse for being a bit... | ||
| I think the operative word is dingy today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it? | |
| I started getting a sore throat last night when I was working on a new film, and then I got home and didn't sleep too well. | ||
| I'm sitting here on air running a fever right now. | ||
| With a raw throat, so just bear it with me if I'm not my normal chipper self. | ||
| I probably shouldn't even do a radio show if I'm sick because, again, I got home last night and my wife had taped Mel Gibson on the national show on ABC with Diane Sawyer, primetime. | ||
| and I guess we hadn't taped the whole thing. | ||
| And I'm like, yep, I knew it. | ||
| They didn't talk about weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| See, I knew she'd cut that out, and indeed it was in there. | ||
| So that's encouraging. | ||
| Your wife cut it out. | ||
| No, he had a fever. | ||
| He was just completely delirious from this fever and sore throat that he had. | ||
| COVID 2004. | ||
| Boy, this reminds me of whenever he suddenly had a terrible cough at a trial recently. | ||
| Suddenly a terrible cough appeared! | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think of Alex as a tough-it-out kind of guy. | ||
| And I don't... | ||
| Up till this point, and after, I saw no signs of a scratchy throat. | ||
| There is nothing like... | ||
| This is just pathetic. | ||
| Just trying to come up with more excuses for why he hasn't seen... | ||
| But he refuses to just come out and say, I didn't watch all of it, or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| He can't take responsibility for his own decisions. | ||
| There's a hundred excuses for something as trivial as I didn't watch the Diane Sawyer thing. | ||
| He cannot take responsibility for his own actions. | ||
| You know what would be so great? | ||
| Just come on air and be like, look, I didn't get around to the Diane Sawyer thing. | ||
| I was working on this film. | ||
| I know you probably want to talk about it, so let's save those calls for tomorrow. | ||
| We'll watch it tonight. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Could do that. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| Instead, he had to try and bluff. | ||
| You gotta bluff. | ||
| You gotta bluff. | ||
| Sometimes you get caught on your bluff, but that doesn't mean you stop trying. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| That is a terrible idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex wants to complain about some racial grievance that he has about whiteness. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he uses a story that I looked into and ended up spiraling into some weird information. | ||
| All right. | ||
| In public schools all over the nation, if your child writes the word gun in an essay for English class... | ||
| They're arrested. | ||
| They're expelled. | ||
| CPS is sent to the home. | ||
| Well, your child, you know, in a story, wrote about a gun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it's thought crime. | |
| A few years ago, there was a case in Idaho where a black football coach assaulted a white woman who was a reporter because she took his picture at the end of the game, and the woman's husband jumped over at the bleachers and ran up to the black man, and the black man called him a racial name. | ||
| This was in the newspaper, and we had him on the show, and the white man called him a racial name back, and he was arrested for the racial term, and the black man wasn't arrested for assaulting the woman. | ||
| And my point is, is that this is thought crime in America, and they're really trying to set this up. | ||
| They're doing this. | ||
| So Alex has some details off about this story because it's not really an actual event that happened in terms of how his mind relates to it. | ||
| This is just a vague memory that he pulls up to justify his feelings of intense racial persecution over his whiteness. | ||
| Also, even if everything Alex was saying was true, that's not a thought crime. | ||
| Explicit actions were made, not thoughts. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and do this now because I feel like we've done this. | ||
| This fun rabbit hole thing before, and I want to have my predictions in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you want to write them down, or do you want to verbalize them? | ||
| No, I'll verbalize them. | ||
| Okay, so here's what I think. | ||
| Here's how this normally goes down, all right? | ||
| We have a story that Alex is misrepresenting, and this guy's a real piece of shit, all right? | ||
| Then you come back. | ||
| We've got another story in, like, 2012, where he was arrested for blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Then you come back, and then in 2014, he was caught with, like, 300 pounds of explosives in his fucking... | ||
| Not exactly. | ||
| The guy himself... | ||
| There's a little bit of manipulation on that front, and then there's an offshoot character. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| That is more important. | ||
| All right, that's what I'm... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So in the real world, this guy wasn't a coach that is involved. | ||
| He was actually a referee at a high school football game. | ||
| The woman in question was a reporter named Kimberly Ray, who was trying to take pictures of the referees specifically because she thought they had decided the outcome of the game, and one of the teams wasn't going to go to state because of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She told ABC... | ||
| A lot of penalties were called throughout the game, and I decided I was going to include that perspective in my stories. | ||
| So, she felt that there were a lot of penalties in this high school football game and decided that her reporting was going to reflect that. | ||
| She tried to take pictures of the refs after the game was over while they were leaving to the locker room. | ||
| She was asked not to take their picture, and according to her, she stopped and was going to leave when one of them grabbed her camera and tried to wrestle it from her. | ||
| She yelled for her husband, who came to her defense. | ||
| The ref put up his hands and said, according to the husband, I ain't touched her. | ||
| This, like I said, is a story that's coming from her husband, Lonnie Ray. | ||
| So, at no point in his telling of it... | ||
| To ABC, did the referee call him any racist names? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That did not happen in his telling of the story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| However, he immediately stormed towards the locker room and found the county commissioner there, which should give you a sense of how small of a town we're talking about. | ||
| So Lonnie told ABC that he said to the county commissioner, you bring that N up here, I want to kick his fucking ass. | ||
| And it was not an N. No, I understand. | ||
| It was a full... | ||
| I think we all got the hard R in your voice. | ||
| Oh yes. | ||
| And thus, Lonnie Ray was looking at charges involving hate speech. | ||
| Mostly because he was using fighting words and making threats while using a racial slur, which could easily be argued implies some greater desire to commit violence against the person because of their race. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lonnie didn't get convicted of the hate crime portion of the charges, but he did get charged with assault, and he ended up getting seven days in jail, which his lawyer appealed, and the conviction was eventually vacated. | ||
| This all happened in a town in Idaho with a population of around 7,000, and it happened three and a half years in the past at this point when Alex was on air. | ||
| Amazing that this is fresh in his mind as some kind of an oh-no thing. | ||
| I mean, that tells you exactly what sticks, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes you see what spaghetti stuck on the wall and you're like, really? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| So Lonnie's lawyer was a guy named Edgar Steele who made his bread and butter defending white supremacists in court. | ||
| Great. | ||
| He had recently at that point defended Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and he would later go on to be the lawyer slash spokesperson for the white supremacist pop duo Prussian Blue. | ||
| I don't know if you know them, but they were like... | ||
| 12 years old. | ||
| They were 12-year-old twins who would sing, like, white man, rise up. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it was horrible. | ||
| That's child abuse. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's child abuse, for sure. | ||
| They're in that documentary that Louis Theroux did, Louis Meets the Nazis. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And, like, it's horrifying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's just so scary to see them, like, just repeating these things that obviously... | ||
| Right, they don't understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they can't. | |
| Later in life, they still apparently have some problematic views and maybe are Holocaust revisionists. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they have also said, like, we were just repeating things that we didn't even understand. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| And it's horrifying. | ||
| So anyway, his lawyer, this guy at the Idaho football game, his lawyer was their spokesperson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He also published a book called, quote, Defensive Racism, an Unapologetic Examination of Racial Differences, which is something he clearly has very strong feelings about. | ||
| He really only took Lonnie's case because he thought it could be something that he could take to the Supreme Court to strike down hate speech laws all across the country. | ||
| That is the game that was being played. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| He was case shopping. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I found Steele's book, and man, if I were trying to defend myself after I yelled a racist threat at somebody, I would definitely not want him as my lawyer. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It starts out by doing a little light teasing around the idea that maybe being a racist isn't so bad. | ||
| And it's just kind of a cute put your preconceptions aside. | ||
| You can pick them back up at the end of the book. | ||
| Listen, you think... | ||
| Take everything you know about the word racist and just forget it. | ||
| You could pick it back up at the end of the book. | ||
| Start all over. | ||
| All I'm asking is for 150 pages of your time. | ||
| You can't learn until you unlearn. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then by the end of it, here's where we get. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Quote, That's quite an escalation. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He lays out a bizarre fantasy where Mexico and Mexican-Americans reclaim the Southwest and create Astlan, and black people, they claim the South as New Africa. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White people are going to be up north, but it's important to remember that, quote, Florida will be a special case due to its large population of Cuban and Caribbean extraction. | |
| How it will shake out is interesting. | ||
| Anybody's guess, but it will end up being a white no-go zone. | ||
| Of that, you can be sure. | ||
| I appreciate somebody who's given me the good warnings in advance, you know? | ||
| Like, now that I know eventually it will be a no-go zone for white people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But how it's going to shake out exactly, anybody's guess. | ||
| I assume that the white nationalist president of the United States will retire there to his second White House that will, I guess, eventually become a fort? | ||
| It's anybody's guess. | ||
| It's anybody's guess. | ||
| So there's also going to be New Israel, which is of course centered around New York, or as Steele calls it, New Tel Aviv. | ||
| Okay, wow. | ||
| That's just racist beyond racist. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| That's pointless racism. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Canada will throw in their lot with this new America and, quote, thus the new America becomes pretty much a white homeland with its borders imposed upon it by others in the main. | ||
| Only the presence of Jews may be problematic and by far may prove to be the single most difficult task confronting new America. | ||
| The single most difficult task? | ||
| You've just broken up the country into hostile quadrants, and the most difficult thing for you is the idea that Jews might still be there. | ||
| Well, I mean, they might, you know. | ||
| They don't have their own full nation size? | ||
| I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| You can just see how much this guy, how anti-Semitic he is. | ||
| He is deeply and fucked up. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
| So we can wrap this up with some good news, though. | ||
| Edgar Steele was arrested and convicted in 2011 of trying to hire somebody to kill his wife. | ||
| 2011? | ||
| I was one year off! | ||
| I was one year off! | ||
| He was sentenced to 50 years in jail for trying to put a car bomb. | ||
| So you had explosives for it, too. | ||
| It's not bad! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not bad! | ||
| He died in prison in 2014. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| But not before Alex posted an article in 2012 on Infowars that argued that Steele was set up and incarcerated thanks to the NDAA, I guess because he was too much of a political threat to Obama. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Steele was way too obviously a white supremacist and wasn't Mel Gibson's dad, so Alex couldn't have him on the show. | ||
| But he was still willing to use the website to associate in some way with him and make the argument that he got jammed up. | ||
| So there is still a little bit of a little connection to Alex. | ||
| I mean, that guy can't be your friend. | ||
| There's so many signs now. | ||
| You go back and you see this shit and you're like, why are you just fine with them being friends? | ||
| And if you are that guy, Lonnie Ray, in Idaho... | ||
| You know what this guy's about if he's your lawyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're in Idaho. | ||
| You know what's going on. | ||
| It's a choice that you're making, and that tells me a bit about you. | ||
| And that says that you talked to that lawyer for a while, and that lawyer was probably like, I'm going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. | ||
| And you were like, yeah! | ||
| Yeah, and I can tell by context clues that this is not the first time you've yelled the N-word angrily at somebody. | ||
| You don't... | ||
| Find that guy after your first N-word. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Your first N-word, you feel shame. | ||
| I mean, hopefully. | ||
| Actually, I don't even want to go down this riff. | ||
| This is terrible and gross. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| So, yeah, I found that interesting. | ||
| And his book is vivid. | ||
| This fantasy of the way the United States is going to break down into these racial states. | ||
| It's grim. | ||
| It's very sad. | ||
| It is one of those paranoid fantasies that is so absurd on its face. | ||
| To tell you exactly what you think of human beings. | ||
| The idea of, well, obviously, we'll just congregate around race. | ||
| And Alex's buddy, Matt Bracken, has very similar ideas. | ||
| There's a lot of people in Alex's orbit that are straight up on that tip. | ||
| It's so weird to me how many white people are like, oh, well, obviously everybody else is just as racist as we are. | ||
| That's a bananas thought that white people have. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| So there is something else that's a little bit depressing. | ||
| So he went to prison, this Edgar Rice guy, or Edgar Steele guy, because he tried to hire someone to kill his wife. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| After that, his wife still supported him. | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His wife was involved in trying to get him let out of prison because she was so into a lot of that other white supremacist shit and anti-Semitism stuff that he was all about. | ||
| That, like, she couldn't believe it was possible that he would hire someone to kill her, and it must have been the ADL trying to set him up. | ||
| That's willing to die for the cause, is what that is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| That is... | ||
| Bananas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Man, that must have been his fucking luckiest day when he's got the commissary numbers and it's like, oh, this is going down. | ||
| It's a good thing my wife doesn't think I tried to kill her like I'm in jail for for the rest of my life. | ||
| I mean, it was just a shocking story. | ||
| I just don't even know. | ||
| I just don't even know. | ||
| So anyway, some more callers want to talk about the thing that Alex didn't watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Diane tried to put a wedge in there, and Boyd Nell stood up to her. | |
| When she mentioned something about Hutton saying, they were talking about Jews encamped in the Holocaust during the Second World War, and like 6,000 Jews, and Hutton seems to think, I'm not sure. | ||
| I just gathered from what was said last night that there were less than 6,000 Jews. | ||
| And Mel said, you know, 6,000, 2,000, 3,000. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It was too many. | ||
| She started on it again, and he looked at her, right eye to eye, nose to nose, and he said, Diane, don't go there. | ||
| In other words, don't try to put a wedge between my father and me. | ||
| Previously, he had said, I love my father. | ||
| I respect him. | ||
| We get along well. | ||
| we're really tight and she tried to put that wedge in there and he just stood up to her and I thought wow go man go Well, I'm really frustrated now. | ||
| I guess I only got about half the show. | ||
| How long was it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was an hour's show. | |
| Unreal. | ||
| You know how long it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it was the full hour. | |
| Well, a listener called, and the listener said that if I'll just stop asking for a copy of it, he'll send me one, and that's good. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That caller is fascinating for a number of reasons. | ||
| So many reasons. | ||
| The first and most obvious one is that she thinks that there were 6,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust, which is indicative of someone who doesn't really know all that much about history. | ||
| I thought she had misspoken. | ||
| She said it multiple times. | ||
| She said it multiple times, and then in comparison, she said 6,000, 2,000, 3,000, like, no. 6,000 was the number? | ||
| She believed. | ||
| That level of ignorance is perfect for someone like Alex to prey on because 6,000 people dead during a war is a lot easier to minimize than millions. | ||
| Hey, 6,000, 2,000, 3,000? | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Too many. | ||
| The second thing that jumps right out at you is that this caller has no idea what Hutton Gibson actually is and what he actually believes. | ||
| Hutton has been on as a guest with Alex twice in the past month or so, and at no point has any of this element of his belief system come up because Alex is careful to present a curated version of his guests so the audience doesn't get scared off by their horrible ideas. | ||
| This caller thinks she's informed on Hutton because she's watched Alex's show, but in reality... | ||
| The third thing is that this caller believes that Diane Sawyer is trying to drive a wedge between Mel and his father by asking about how his dad is a Holocaust denier and whether or not he shares any of his dad's beliefs. | ||
| That is a fair question for Diane to ask, and it's not driving a wedge. | ||
| If anything, Hutton's Holocaust denial is what should be considered to be driving a wedge. | ||
| Yeah, it seems more like it's a turn in the light on to see which side of the line you stand upon, Mel Gibson. | ||
| Mel has made a movie that is offensive to many people, specifically in terms of its depiction of Jewish people. | ||
| One of the things that critics have had a problem with is how the film plays into the tropes around DS. | ||
| Mel's dad is part of a traditionalist Catholic movement that is particularly mad about the Vatican condemning accusations of deicide against Jewish people. | ||
| Mel's dad is a Holocaust denier. | ||
| Given that set of premises, it's very relevant and fair to ask Mel if he's also a Holocaust denier, and if he doesn't want to answer that... | ||
| That's his business, but Diane Sawyer wouldn't be doing her job if she just left that totally alone. | ||
| This caller doesn't have a serious point, and she has no idea what she's talking about, but she feels very strongly about the subject, and that feeling is what matters more than reality. | ||
| And Alex does really nothing to help bring more information to the table. | ||
| It just allows those feelings. | ||
| It plays into the feelings. | ||
| I mean, it is such a weird thing that we have in the United States. | ||
| No, I guess it's worldwide. | ||
| It's just human beings, right? | ||
| You can listen to this conversation that somebody has with Mel Gibson where they're like, hey, do you deny the Holocaust? | ||
| And he's like, don't go there. | ||
| And you'll be like, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no. | |
| That wasn't the question. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| It was about his dad. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But my point is essentially, the answer that he's giving is the answer, despite the words not being what you think they should be. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Kind of, yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, did you hire Edgar Steele? | ||
| If no one, if you knew nothing about the Holocaust and somebody like Diane Sawyer on television for ABC doing journalism is like, hey, the Holocaust happened, you'd be like, you did? | ||
| There's no complicated responses there. | ||
| Right, but if you see kind of a weaselish response from Mel Gibson being made, and you're a viewer who thinks like, you know what? | ||
| Diane Sawyer is all CFR, and she's just trying to trap him in these things. | ||
| You could see it like, oh, he's just not willing to play her games, or whatever. | ||
| There's ways to recontextualize these things that satisfy the feelings that you need to have. | ||
| But there's so many shorter answers, like, do you deny the Holocaust? | ||
| No! | ||
| See? | ||
| See how quick that is! | ||
| It didn't take any time. | ||
| We could move on. | ||
| Nobody has to be like, we need to find out if you really believe this or not. | ||
| If you don't say no, I feel like you've already told me what you think. | ||
| It wasn't in this interview, but in another one, that question directly came up, and Mel Gibson gave an answer that was like, yeah! | ||
| A lot of people die in war, that kind of thing. | ||
| Of course it happened. | ||
| You've already told me everything you need to tell me. | ||
| I know you didn't say I'm a giant anti-Semite who loves the Nazis, but you just said that. | ||
| Your answer is not good to this question. | ||
| No! | ||
| It implies other beliefs. | ||
| Words have to have meanings that you can understand. | ||
| Otherwise they're pointless. | ||
| So according to Alex, the media hates Christians. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Basically, what you said is so right. | ||
| The media is trying to drive a wedge into the public psyche so people don't see this film or so they don't get the message of the film. | ||
| The media is anti-Christian. | ||
| I mean, that's obvious. | ||
| It's just, you know, watch a TV show. | ||
| That message is everywhere. | ||
| And so they try to raise this anti-Semitism red herring because that's a horrible allegation. | ||
| But we'll come back and continue with your calls, wide open phones today. | ||
| You know what would have been really helpful for Alex if he wants to play this game about the media lying about Hutton and his anti-Semitism? | ||
| Alex should have asked Hutton what he thinks about the Holocaust while he was on the show so he could see for himself. | ||
| Hutton doesn't make a secret of his beliefs. | ||
| He wrote a whole newsletter about them, and he's talked about that shit when reporters have asked. | ||
| Alex intentionally didn't ask about that stuff because if he did, he couldn't pretend the media was lying about Hutton's ideology because it would be coming straight from his mouth. | ||
| This is just a dumb fucking game that Alex is playing of just kind of hiding the point. | ||
| And I guess you can see why he's doing it. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| I'm gonna have to push back. | ||
| I don't think the media was very anti-Christian at this time at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I think there was quite a bit of very pro-Christian media to the point now where I feel like if I went back and visited it, I might in my conscious brain now be like, oh, there's some anti-Semitic tropes that were just on TV! | ||
| Like, that's probably there! | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| So Alex has a feeling about the show up till this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And I will say I disagree with it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, predominantly on the show today, we've been talking about the First Amendment and how it's under attack here in the United States. | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| And how freedom of speech worldwide is under attack, and listeners have been calling in one after another, saying how great they thought the crime time piece was last night with Mel Gibson, with the CFR member Diane Sawyer, and how Mel did a pretty good job of fending off her attempts at demonization. | ||
| This show has not been about the First Amendment being under attack or anything. | ||
| It's been the complaining about the thing he didn't watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| While everybody... | ||
| And attacking Abraham Foxman unnecessarily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, again, like his whole angle, start of the day, they portrayed Mel Gibson wrong and they cut out all the stuff and they did all this thing to make him look bad. | ||
| Everyone's response on the phones is like, I thought he did a great job. | ||
| He comes off looking good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, the story of this episode up to this point is Alex came in with a preloaded narrative that was based on not watching the thing he's talking about. | ||
| And it's completely collapsed under his feet. | ||
| He's made multiple excuses. | ||
| Tons. | ||
| I had a fever. | ||
| My wife didn't record it. | ||
| He's got a sore throat, man. | ||
| I got annoyed rewinding. | ||
| My wife recorded five minutes of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a hundred reasons why he didn't watch this, but yeah, generally speaking... | ||
| All of the response from the audience has been exactly counter to the narrative that he put up. | ||
| And so a little bit of that is why it's very convenient to pivot over to the, why is the ADL changing their tune? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So you can kind of get a little bit of traffic out of that, a little mileage. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| This is why you don't bluff on TV or on the radio. | ||
| You don't broadcast your bluffs. | ||
| You want to win. | ||
| It's fun, though. | ||
| If you're going to bluff... | ||
| Pre-record. | ||
| If you're going to bluff, pre-record, and then just don't release it. | ||
| It's fun, though, to see Alex sort of try and maneuver this. | ||
| He is living on the edge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will say that. | ||
| I don't think his audience has really quite understood that he didn't watch shit. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, he watched a couple minutes. | ||
| We'll see again. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Well, no, because he has a couple specifics. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But yeah, he has some thoughts about The Passion, though. | ||
| At this point, I was kind of tearing out my hair. | ||
| I was just talking to Hutton during the break. | ||
| He thought it was a pretty good piece, and so did I. What else can they do? | ||
| I mean, it's a good movie. | ||
| It's a wholesome film. | ||
| Why, then, has the media been demonizing The Passion of Christ? | ||
| And this is just a microcosm example of how, across the board, Anything that's wholesome and good is being attacked, while things that are evil are being held up as good. | ||
| But, I mean, basically, that's all I can say on the subject. | ||
| So now it's good, the piece. | ||
| And also, The Passion of the Christ is wholesome and a good movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| You haven't seen it! | ||
| It's wholesome. | ||
| It's another thing that you haven't seen that you're making strong claims about. | ||
| It's a wholesome and good movie. | ||
| What? | ||
| No, I read the book. | ||
| I read the book. | ||
| I can't handle this. | ||
| He talks so much about things he has not experienced. | ||
| It is like... | ||
| I mean, Fox News at this time was not... | ||
| It wasn't the Fox News that we have today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It was still very on the right wing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And quite patriotism focused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Totally. | ||
| But their argument shows were always about like... | ||
| Arguing about the reality and not, like, hiding everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would just yell reality down. | ||
| You had, like, Hannity and Combs. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They would do that. | ||
| This is that proto-Fox News where it's like, I don't even give a fuck about reality. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I don't care what they say. | ||
| I don't care what anybody says. | ||
| If that sun is not blue, you're wrong. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And it's like, that's just what they do. | ||
| And that's Alex being like, well, fuck it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I guess it was a good piece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, it was good. | |
| It was bad. | ||
| Whatever anybody says, I'm going to give you what you want, and you're going to give me money for it. | ||
| So there's another thing that happens a little bit on this episode, which is on our last 2004 episode, Alex talked to a gun-grabbing preacher, a Presbyterian preacher, who he tricked into coming on the show. | ||
| One of the great interviews. | ||
| And so a couple of callers on this episode also want to complain about him still. | ||
| Oh, I guess who's up next here? | ||
| Victor. | ||
| Victor in Florida. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, I'm calling from Pensacola, and I wanted to comment on the so-called pastor from Presbyterian Church USA in Dallas. | |
| Yeah, and for those again that just joined us, recap what happened yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, basically, he is a gun grabber who's using his church to indoctrinate people into believing that you shouldn't have guns. | |
| Move on! | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry, are you calling Alex? | ||
| Days after. | ||
| No, the next day. | ||
| The next day. | ||
| Day two of complaining about this pastor. | ||
| You're calling Alex the next day to say to Alex the thing Alex said to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just wanted to double check on that. | ||
| I'm playing about this. | ||
| Alex said specifically those exact words. | ||
| Well, there's more complaining about Presbyterians after this because they are into open borders. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Alex's evidence of this is that they will put up water for people who are migrants and stuff. | ||
| Those awful, terrible people. | ||
| They don't want people to die. | ||
| They're open borders Presbyterians? | ||
| That doesn't seem to be open borders advocacy to me as much as it is humanitarian aid. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| And then also, Alex says, and they're into all those marriages, which is code for same-sex marriage. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which Alex is staunchly opposed to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I was thinking about that time that Jesus saw that dude on the road, and he was blind or whatever, and Jesus was like, I'm going to put some mud in those eyes, and then you're going to be able to see, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What if instead he was like, Immigrant! | ||
| And then punched him, and then ran away. | ||
| We'd have a much better Bible. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Open borders. | ||
| We don't have an open Bible. | ||
| Not open Bible. | ||
| So you have one last caller, and there's a couple clips of this, because it's a... | ||
| Everything's interesting, but it's a portrait that we have. | ||
| We see Alex as this guy who is incapable of critical thinking, won't push back on stuff. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| But that's not true. | ||
| He does push back on some stuff. | ||
| So he gets a caller who wants to talk about Nessera. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Which is now a big thing with QAnon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 20 years later. | ||
| I saw the... | ||
| Because I didn't know... | ||
| I'd never seen it written out before. | ||
| We've only talked about Nessera and Jessera. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then one day, I think I saw one of the Twitter trending topics was Nessera, and I was like... | ||
| That's how it's written down, and I know instantly, oh, we're fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's cue it on. | ||
| I mean, it was already a thing here, even in 2004 in conspiracy circles. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
| And so this caller wants to talk about it, and Alex is like, it's not real. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I can tell you in advance why. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's because it's a hope narrative. | ||
| It's a narrative that everything is okay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, like, there's going to be this reset of the economy, and all of your debts are going to be forgiven. | ||
| There's a plan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Alex does not like that because he wants to scare you. | ||
| Plans are evil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| People who make plans are killing you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is how it works. | ||
| Lisa in Michigan, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Alex. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm doing okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen, we just found out a couple days ago on February 12th that the NACERA bill is not a dead bill. | |
| In fact, it was passed secretly on March 9th, 2000. | ||
| Hey, NACERA is not real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it was secretly... | |
| No, that's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what they wanted. | |
| There's a gag order on that. | ||
| And it was secretly passed on March 9th. | ||
| Okay, for those that just joined us, why don't you tell people what NACERA claims to be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, NACERA gives forgiveness of credit card, mortgage debt, and other bank loans as remedy for bank and government fraud. | |
| Avalishes the IRS, creates flat rate, non-essential, new items only, sales tax revenue for government. | ||
| It restores constitutional law. | ||
| It initiates U.S. Treasury bank system, which absorbs the Federal Reserve and new precious metals back U.S. Treasury currency. | ||
| I don't know much about it, Alex, but they requested it to the World Court as we speak right now. | ||
| Well, you say you don't know much about it. | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we just found out about it, but we do know it was secretly passed on March 9th. | |
| And how do you know that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to fax the documents to you today. | |
| You mean you're going to fax the stuff that's on the internet to me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they got a gag order on it. | |
| Fair. | ||
| Well, Lisa, I'm not trying to be mean to you, but I live this. | ||
| This is my life, okay? | ||
| And they came out a few years ago and said, everything's all right. | ||
| The government secretly passed laws reinstituting the Constitution. | ||
| And everything's okay now. | ||
| Meanwhile, they're passing Patriot Act 1 and 2, all this stuff's happening, and there's this rumor, there's this secret law that was passed, and everything's okay now, and I'm telling you, it's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it says that there was four petitions in the world court submitted by the banking system with the Illuminati. | |
| They're trying to stop this, Alex. | ||
| They're trying to stop this because it's going to make them go down. | ||
| So Alex is able to push back on stuff, and he's even able to say, like, oh, some dumb thing you found on the internet? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's what you do, man. | ||
| That's everything you do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's everything you do. | ||
| Don't qualify this. | ||
| How fucking dare you? | ||
| Yeah, it's a little rude. | ||
| That is... | ||
| But there's the best moment ever. | ||
| Do you not know that we have a Wikipedia article in a manila envelope? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Look, there's just the best moment ever. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right here. | ||
| I had to isolate it. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yeah, I heard that. | ||
| I heard that. | ||
| I was like, that's got to be him, right? | ||
| But then I also thought, hey, it could be anybody. | ||
| Anybody listening with a mic nearby would be like, oh, God. | ||
| I mean, like, he's trying to just be like... | ||
| You have to accept my authority on this. | ||
| I have researched all of these things and this thing that you found online is bullshit. | ||
| All the things I find online and tell you about are true and very important. | ||
| And she won't listen. | ||
| And that's what's making him say, oh god. | ||
| She keeps coming back with like, it's sent to the world court and... | ||
| She doesn't care that he's trying to present himself as the guy who knows it all. | ||
| I was waiting for him to go off on just like a, oh, what? | ||
| What did you have it in a dream? | ||
| Did you dream that it was passed? | ||
| Did you dream that there's some sort of vast cabal of people out here going around trying to make everybody do evil things? | ||
| Of course you believe that nonsense. | ||
| But there's also, in that clip, you can see the kind of better... | ||
| Yeah, tearing it all down. | ||
| Anathema to what he can possibly go for. | ||
| So even though it's a fun conspiracy narrative and a lot of people are into it, it's something that Alex will never be on board with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I'm not on board with it, period. | |
| Even if it is a good thing, I don't think laws should be passed in secret. | ||
| I'm gonna throw that out there. | ||
| I think if you're passing secret laws, something is far... | ||
| There's a far larger problem going on. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here is the rest of him talking to her. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he's just sort of condemning himself a little bit. | ||
| Through her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ma 'am, Nasera is not real. | ||
| I could go... | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I could go start a website. | ||
| You did. | ||
| And say that I had Easter bunnies. | ||
| I was patching out in my backyard, and a secret law had been passed concerning the Easter bunnies, and the government was blocking it. | ||
| Lieutenant Colonel's have told me. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Globalists. | ||
| It's an urban legend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, a doctor from out in Hillsdale County was telling us that this is true. | |
| Okay, all right. | ||
| They're trying to keep it. | ||
| It's not a good thing, though, Alex. | ||
| They got a gag thing on it. | ||
| They got a gag thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they got a gag order on it. | |
| In fact, he said, if you say anything about the law, or if they start the treason and punishment by death, this is what they're telling us to the U.S. Supreme Court. | ||
| This is basic craziness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know it is. | |
| But what I think we need to know... | ||
| I think it's weird, too, but I want you to know and I want you to check it out. | ||
| Don't believe me. | ||
| I want you to check it out. | ||
| Ma 'am, did you not hear me, Lisa? | ||
| I have checked it out for three years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, this is the stuff that's getting forwarded to us, and it's in the world. | |
| They're waiting for it. | ||
| They requested it right now, and they're waiting for it to process it. | ||
| Hey, Lisa, I'm not here criticizing you. | ||
| I mean, it's okay that you called up asking me about Nassara, but I keep telling you that I have researched it, and you tell me I need to research it. | ||
| I'm telling you, it's an urban legend. | ||
| The government didn't secretly make everything all right and give us our rights back. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's not all right. | |
| That's just it. | ||
| It seems like a good thing, but it's not. | ||
| Okay, thank you for the call. | ||
| It didn't sound like I'm going to convince you, so... | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, everybody's running around going, the government's really good, and they secretly overthrew the New World Order in 2000, and the New World Order is covering this up. | ||
| I'm going to hang up on you because you won't let me gatekeep your conspiracy ideas. | ||
| Yeah, my biggest problem is your conspiracy ideas are different from mine. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm not going to be able to... | ||
| You won't bend to my reality, and so I have no point in talking. | ||
| Yeah, you know, here's what I was thinking, alright? | ||
| I was thinking, I had a thought when she said that. | ||
| This is what we're getting forwarded, right? | ||
| And I was reminded of the number of FWD colons back in the days that you used to get. | ||
| And then I was like, oh, well, with social media, at least I don't get those emails anymore because all those people do that shit on social media and that saves my inbox. | ||
| And then I went back and revisited that and I was like, no. | ||
| That stuff should be in your email box. | ||
| That should be in your inbox. | ||
| You should leave it there. | ||
| Yeah, it should go to spam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And now instead it's like tweets that people end up seeing. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| It's worse that it's not something that you can just ignore easily in your email. | ||
| What a huge mistake we all made whenever we complained about those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We didn't even know! | ||
| We had it so good. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And then we were complaining about those, and we were like, well, at least it's not the chain letters that you got in the mail. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| We gotta go back. | ||
| We gotta go back, buddy. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Get this thing up to 88 miles an hour. | ||
| Oh, I thought you were doing a jack in season three or four of Lost. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have to go back. | |
| I'm going back to the future. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Back in time. | ||
| So, we come to the end of this. | ||
| And, man, I swear. | ||
| I was expecting something with the cliffhanger of Alex having the Diane Sawyer thing to watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I didn't expect this. | ||
| No. | ||
| I didn't, in a million years, expect that he wouldn't have watched it and try to pretend that he did. | ||
| He had to. | ||
| It just never occurred to me. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| That's not a thought that I had. | ||
| He's such a weird dude that, like, everything is, like, not everything, but a lot of things are very unpredictable. | ||
| We can still be kind of surprised by bad choices that he makes. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Different genres of bad choice. | ||
| Yeah, it's like if you brought it up in a production meeting, like, hey guys, I didn't actually see this, then somebody would have given you some notes. | ||
| Who's he having a production meeting with? | ||
| I know, again... | ||
| His wife called him during a break. | ||
| Again, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's my point here, is that all of this is going wrong because he's just keeping it up there. | ||
| He's going to do a production meeting talking to a lamp. | ||
| Don't be a player manager. | ||
| No. | ||
| Dolph Shays. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Danny Shays? | ||
| One of the Shayses. | ||
| One of those Shayses. | ||
| Anyway, we'll be back, Jordan. | ||
| Indeed we will. | ||
| For another episode soon. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| Here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |