#1012: January 29, 2025 dissects RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing, exposing his $1M+ kickback scheme with Weisner Baum and Children’s Health Defense’s anti-vaccine merch despite debunked SV40 claims. Alex Jones deflects with globalist conspiracy theories, misquoting Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, while Dan and Jordan mock his sensationalism—like framing rural healthcare as an "illegal alien" issue or comparing RFK Jr.’s policies to a "black bag" doctor. The episode highlights how Infowars’ rhetoric thrives on distraction, ignoring governance realities while amplifying fringe narratives like Joe Biggs’ exaggerated "Trump assassination" claims, revealing a pattern of exploitation over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
Thank you, and my phone number is one digit from Alex's old control room phone number, and I used to get voicemails for people calling into Alex's show.
In 2017, I got a message about shadow brokers and QAnon, and that's when I started listening to Knowledge Fight.
I think, and I don't know that I want to ask him to get into it, but he has listed his assets and has gone through a discussion of the responsibilities under our ethics laws.
So this episode starts with Alex in the middle of watching the RFK confirmation hearings.
He's yelling about how much he doesn't like Elizabeth Warren.
So Warren was asking a question about how RFK has profited off of spreading vaccine misinformation and lawsuits against the very agencies he would end up being in charge of if he's confirmed, and how that's a pretty clear conflict of interest.
Alex says that making $2.5 million suing these agencies is just what lawyers do.
That's what RFK was doing, but that's not what RFK did.
He made this money on referral fees, essentially serving as a spokesperson who would direct people to a law firm called Weisner Baum, who would then sue these agencies, and then RFK would get a cut.
He's been pretty public about wanting to remove liability protections for vaccines, which would represent a huge payday for him personally through this kickback arrangement of finders fees for lawsuits.
Great.
In order for Alex to present the people that he likes in a good light, he can't even let the basic details of what they're up to or have been up to He has to create this like, that's what lawyers do!
No, I think it's actually very interesting that we've all kind of agreed now at the end of the day, like, it's not even as much of a pejorative as you'd like now.
People are openly like, yeah, of course I'm a conspiracy theorist.
Like, this is a line of questioning that he cannot engage with at all, and he needs to distract away from it as much as possible.
Bernie is asking RFK a question that reveals his primary deception.
In a respectable setting, like a confirmation hearing, he'll say that he's a guy who's in favor of vaccines, and he just has some hard questions to ask because he wants to make things better.
But in reality, he's selling explicitly anti-vaccine merch to his audience.
Essentially, Bernie's question reveals how RFK wants to have his cake and eat it too, and it should make people think that maybe he's a liar.
RFK knows two things.
One, his strident anti-vaccine arguments are flimsy, debunked, and would be embarrassing to try to defend in a formal setting like this confirmation hearing.
Two, no one is buying merch that says, I support vaccines, but I have some questions about the medical establishment.
In order to profit from the audience, he needs to convey one message.
Then he needs to moderate and distort that message in order to make himself acceptable to be close to power.
Everybody knows he's lying, but both sides are betting that they're lying in their favor.
The people in the confirmation hearing are betting that he's lying to his gullible audience to make money and won't really be an anti-vaccine zealot if he's given power.
The people in the audience are betting that he's actually an anti-vaccine zealot, but he needs to lie to the folks in the hearing in order to be confirmed.
Yeah, it is really interesting, and it kind of tells you, like, from the jump how this stuff was designed, whenever it does feel like a very simple rule to have in, like, a governing body would be, like, if you get caught lying, you're kicked out.
You know, like, he got caught.
You know, like, sometimes you lie and you're like, ah, I didn't catch him.
There was a time where Boston Rob tried to peek over at someone else's board for a solution to something he couldn't figure out, and he got fucked by it.
They were like, no, no, no, stop the game, stop the game, you cheated.
You can see here how Alex just has a model where he sees a problem, and without even thinking about it, he reports that the group in the population he doesn't like is to blame for it.
So in the real world, rural health care is a very complicated thing, and it always has been.
For one thing, the population density in rural areas is much lower, so a hospital in a particular area has a much smaller number of potential patients to serve.
This also means that hospitals will be more distant from each other and from the people who need to get to them, because having close, easily accessible hospitals for everyone just is financially unsustainable.
There are a lot of obvious challenges that providing healthcare in more rural areas presents, and some more complex ones, like how services are just more costly in rural hospitals.
So the same payouts from insurance companies actually represent a lower payment for them proportional to the cost of care.
That's something that is really hard to solve.
I've read a little bit about this, and it seems like one of the main answers to this would just be public investment in rural healthcare.
I've seen no one who...
Who takes this question seriously?
Blame immigrants for hospitals closing.
But that's, you know, more or less just an expression of Alex's racism.
Alex makes it a little too obvious, too, that he's just in this for entertainment and memes, though, with the whole, we'll check in when the left attacks thing.
I would be much more comfortable, like, if I'm the right wing, right, and I'm a person who's trying to use the demagoguery, of course, but also I am familiar with how to write legislation and, like, minutiae and that kind of stuff.
I figure we have two different hearings, right?
We have the TV hearing where everybody's like, ah!
Ah, immigrants did it!
And then we have the adult hearing so Alex doesn't get to see the adult hearing because he's just going to get bored.
Like, all of the people that want RFK Jr. to be in this job don't actually want him to be in the job because they don't know what the job is, right?
Like, we're listening to what the job is and everybody who wants RFK Jr. to be there is like, boring!
Because there's a little bit of like, hey, isn't it strange that, you know, you're all about the chemicals and the food and all this stuff, and then...
It is the chemical secretions, aspartame, of a toxic...
Pieces of an E. coli genetically engineered bacteria that was created, the first one ever deployed in the 70s to eat oil residue on giant oil containment facilities.
So that's an interesting story that Alex has about aspartame being E. coli secretions, but that's not true.
That's not true.
In 1965, a researcher named James Schlatter was working on compounds that could be made into anti-ulcer drugs.
He discovered aspartame by accident when he got some on his finger and he licked it off, which is an insane thing for him to do, and you probably should not have.
He noticed that it was sweet and saw the potential in how sweet it was along with having zero calories.
Alex might be combining this with the discovery of saccharin, which...
Which was found in 1879.
Constantine Fallberg was working on things that you could do with coal tar derivatives, and noticed that one of these things was really sweet, I think the same way, by like licking his hand.
It turned out to be benzoic sulfamide, which brought us saccharin.
It is true, that part about the breakdown process in your body with aspartame, that it becomes a tiny little bit of methanol or wood alcohol.
This is the case with some fresh fruits and vegetables, though, too.
They'll break down into methanol in your gut.
It's not the same thing as drinking wood alcohol.
Methanol itself, in some circumstances, breaks down into formaldehyde, but this is a small concern with drinking way too much stuff that contains aspartame.
But Alex is sensationalizing things a little bit here.
Right, so when we watch TV shows that are set in the 1800s, everybody washes their hair.
We just all accept that that's not what they actually look like.
It's a TV show.
But even in my own conception, I have a hard time...
Putting together whether or not, I think, maybe everybody has, like, at least one or two goiters at all times, or there's just, like, pus-filled sex in armpits.
Like, people were covered in diseases at all times, right?
Or maybe they were fine.
I have no idea.
But essentially, why wouldn't you lick shit off your hand?
You know what I'm saying?
You've got practically a second twin growing out of your neck, and a doctor was like, I'll give you a haircut.
So RFK, one of his big kind of angles is that everything is about...
All of these toxins and all this stuff, and it's causing chronic disease.
And all of us in the medical, all you folk in the medical world, you're trying to solve these medical problems, and it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
And that's what the globalists said, Bertrand Russell and others back in the 40s.
They said, we're going to diet, injections, and injunctions.
We'll make a rebellion by the proletariat, meaning the common people and communist parlance, as futile as sheep rebelling against the practice of eating mutton, which is another name for sheep.
Diet, injections, and injunctions.
Aldous Huxley, his brother, ran the UN-UNESCO Global Eugenics Society, then changed the name of the Transhumanist Society, wrote in 61, Brave New World Revisited, a nonfiction book.
He said, no, Brave New World that I wrote, he said in 31, was based on our plan to poison you and dumb you down so that you would never know what hit you.
Aldous Huxley didn't say that in Brave New World Revisited.
Alex has played manipulatively edited clips from a speech that Huxley gave discussing his reflections on Brave New World, and that's the basis for this claim here, which is false.
Bertrand Russell did not say that the plan was to make the public pacified by diet injections and injunctions.
This is something that Alex is lying about from Russell's book, The Impact of Science on Society.
In the book, he's discussing the serious danger that exists from a combination of a dictatorship and a scientifically advanced society.
From the text, quote, scientific societies are as yet in their infancy.
It may be worthwhile to spend a few moments in speculating as to possible future developments of those that are oligarchies.
It is to be expected that advances in psychology and physiology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.
Fitch laid it down that education should aim to destroy free will so that after pupils had left school, they shall be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmaster.
Makes sense.
In future, such failures are not likely to occur where there is dictatorship.
Diet injections and injunctions will combine from an early age to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.
Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy because the government will tell them they are so.
Russell goes on to suggest that such a society would eventually sterilize all but 5% of the males and 30% of the females who would be required to spend their lives reproducing.
The genetic divide between the elites and the commoners would expand until they were essentially two separate species.
And the idea of revolt among the commoners would, quote, become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
This is all very bad for Russell, though.
He's saying this is a bad thing.
And he says, So these are the kinds of data points that Alex has behind the arguments that he's making.
These are entirely out of context and misrepresented snippets from books that he's never read and he doesn't care to understand at all.
I mean, honestly, the idea is, and I feel stupid for saying this, but the idea is, if your team wins the election, then you are excited about the things they're going to do.
And if they say something like, oh, we're going to help Indians, you cheer!
Yeah, so that moment that Steven Crowder is describing is actually RFK Jr. not being able to understand that everyone used to just treat him with kid gloves because he was super rich and a Kennedy.
It wasn't that everyone used to like what he had to say and they agreed with him and now that he's with Trump, they all don't like him.
It's just that he was part of the super rich club before, so the power structures kind of ignored his insanity.
There's just, it's just crazy because, like, if you've ever read history, there is just no way of knowing that indulging a super rich dilettante throughout their entire life could someday backfire on you.
It is so very frustrating to hear, like, this kind of bullshit because it's like, yes, obviously, the Department of Education, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Whatever you want to say, this sucks.
But, like, if you wanted to solve the problems that you were bringing up, right?
Then I would have to tear apart each individual strand, and to solve that problem, we would fundamentally remake everything.
You know?
Like, there's no way to do that without tearing everything apart and building it back up.
And the person who would get in our way the most is you, fucks!
There are some people who are more than 30 miles away from a hospital.
Let's change the word hospital.
We're talking about in-network and HMO and insurance.
How about we change the word hospital to healthcare practitioner?
Do you realize that all throughout human history, you had doctors who would go to your house?
And we mock it now, but wouldn't that be better than nothing?
Wouldn't it be better to give people choice so that they can actually have a direct relationship with their doctor?
You don't think that in these small towns where they can't go to a giant super hospital, there's no healthcare practitioner there who would be willing to help people?
or my god he might not be approved by medicare and medicaid steven just doesn't fundamentally understand the issues that the adults are discussing about things like rural access to health care the in-network stuff is a side issue but that could be entirely solved by single-payer health care so if steven wants to endorse medicare for all he's welcome to as long as private insurance is a primary driver of coverage you're going to have in-network and out-of-network issues it's a byproduct of the combination of of the market and healthcare.
The larger issue that Steven is entirely ignoring is that a lot of these folks in rural areas do need a hospital.
They don't need a guy to come over and hit their knee with a little mallet.
They need an MRI.
Some kind of practitioner who comes and makes house calls is great, and you can probably find some of that if you want, but it's not feasible for someone to just bring an MRI over to your house.
That needs to exist at a hospital, and technicians need to exist to operate and maintain it.
With smaller pools of potential patients, it's far more costly for a hospital in a rural area to provide that kind of care that a lot of people need.
Folks like Stephen love to pretend that the left and the globalists, they all hate flyover country, but they really could not care any less about the issues that these communities face in terms of accessing care.
Debating providing more money for Medicare payments or providing grants to rural hospitals to restructure their payment models is super boring, but it would help.
What Stephen wants is a little bit less boring.
But the end result is going to end up being a lot of people die.
You're going to be unable to help a lot of people.
And then maybe you'll have some new app where someone brings you soup.
Sometimes I really wish that life would provide some closure in the form of the credit scene for Animal House where it's just like a title card and it's like...
I've been watching a lot of the podcasts you've been doing lately.
I always watch you, but I've been watching you binging, and you just make so many great points.
How would you quantify where we are right now, your report card on Trump, and then where you think things are going and what you think the globalists are going to do now?
If there's ever been someone whose evidence that consequences don't exist, it's Gavin McGinnis.
He's a dude who's not really all that funny and desperately wants to be edgy but really isn't that brave or interesting, so he just kind of lives this existence as a dick.
His show was called Get Off My Lawn, which is kind of perfect because that's his energy.
He's an old asshole on a porch, muttering slurs and complaints about the youth these days, somehow imagining that he's on a crusade to protect his right to do that.
Then he started a violent street gang designed to start fights with left-leaning protesters that recruited only the best members by making them get jumped into the group while naming cereals.
This group was hierarchical, with the only ways to become higher-level members being to stop masturbating and then to assault a liberal protester.
This group got entirely out of hand, and eventually multiple members of the group planned an assault on the U.S. Capitol meant to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.
But nothing happened to McGinnis.
He's still rich and fine acting like a victim and imagining that he has a sense of humor.
What a piece of shit.
A random person posted on Facebook that two January 6th participants who were pardoned by the Trump administration had been killed in the days after the pardon.
But this is just some social media bullshit.
On January 26th, Matthew Huddle, a pardoned January 6th rioter, was pulled over by the police.
He resisted arrest and was shot and killed by the police.
It sucks, and police shouldn't use deadly force like this, but it has nothing to do with him being involved on January 6th.
question was a woman named Tamara Towers Perry who died in October 2024 which is a while before the pardons she was at the Capitol on January 6th and shot video of herself there but was never charged for her action so she's not even a j6-er according to these people great on October 1st people showed up to her house to serve her with paperwork most likely related to the fact that her house was in foreclosure Perry arrived to meet them at the door wielding a shotgun and according to police one of the men serving this paperwork shot her and killed her.
He was not a cop who was serving the paperwork, but he did have a gun.
So Gavin wants to paint the image that two January 6th participants were killed in the past week to tell the audience that they're under threat.
The fact that they were involved in January 6th is supposed to be related to the fact that both of these people were killed, and it's involved in the fact that they're dead.
But if you take a second to consider the facts, this argument falls apart.
For one, neither death had anything to do with their status as a J6-er.
Second, one of the deaths happened in early October, not in the past week.
Third, though both deaths were probably avoidable and unnecessary tragedies, they both involved circumstances that are not mysterious.
One was a guy who resisted arrest, and the other was a woman who threatened people serving her with paperwork with a shotgun.
If you know the details, then you hear Gavin present the story the way he does, you have to conclude one of two things.
Either he knows the details too and is willfully lying about the story for his own manipulative purposes, or he's just seen some dipshit post inaccurate information on social media and he doesn't care about this stuff any deeper than that.
He'll just repeat whatever works for him.
Either way, Gavin McGinnis is a giant piece of shit that no one should take seriously.
And honestly...
I mean, look, there's no standards, but I think it's embarrassing that Alex is having him on.
You know, I think, and I don't think this is a controversial thought, there are very, very, very few and very specific situations where a gun makes things better.
Mm-hmm.
See, the problem is telling the difference between those very, very, very few, very, very, very specific situations and all other situations.
And when people have guns, they tend to make that confusion a lot more damaging.
That's what I would say.
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I don't think that maybe you don't need to answer the door with a shotgun.
So Alex should be careful about this criticism here.
It's easy to mock people holding out hope that some magical solution is going to present itself and solve the problem of Trump being president, like people on Twitter thinking that he's going to be arrested or killed.
But this mockery cuts both directions.
Alex sells his audience exactly the same thing, just in different packaging.
He also spends so much time obsessing about the idea that Trump could be killed.
The only difference is that Alex is exploiting his audience's fear, as opposed to the other side trying to capitalize on misguided hope.
And to illustrate this point, I'd like to take you on a little time travel adventure.
There were so many, too, because when you crop a photo, you can crop out individual, you know, it's not like there would be just one section where all the black people are, and then the rest of them would be white people, making it very, very easy to crop out all the black people.
If my wife was to die in a plane crash, God forbid, I would obviously go through a period of mourning, at least a year, and then I would maybe be willing to go on a date with her.
So this is something that Alex has been complaining about for a bit, but I don't really care.
The New York Magazine ran a cover photo that was headlined The Cruel Kids Table about young Trump supporters.
The article covers an influencer party from the night before the inauguration, and it doesn't say that everyone there was white, but that it was almost all white people.
There's a wide shot Of the cover.
What ended up being the cover that's published in the story and on the online edition of the piece.
But it was cropped for the cover image.
And folks like Alex and Gavin have decided that it was cropped to remove black people to push that narrative.
Some sort of narrative.
Sure.
The image is cropped how it was for pretty clear reasons.
The picture has a natural center, which is a guy in a tux and his friends posing for a picture, which includes this lady that Alex and Gavin have a boner for.
There are many editorial reasons why the image would be cropped this, way, but of course, these guys know better, and it's just another attack on the white man.
You know, sometimes they just remind you that if you wanted to really dig back into the past and the causes and effects and just follow that trail, you get back to a little website that's about whether or not your college friends are hot or not.
It all goes back there.
And then they just bring that back right up to the present day.
What Gavin means is that there's no longer a social cost to being a bigot.
That's what he's celebrating.
There's no higher value or accomplishment that's been reached.
No one's life is materially better for it.
It's just fine to say slurs in public now.
There's no reason you should worry about people judging you for expressing hate.
There's no social cost.
I have no idea what he's talking about with that dog thing, but the other part is referring to this in the article.
This set's most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left's puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity.
A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth's into a giggle fest.
Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me that she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section like a little Mexican.
Then she lets out a cackle.
This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause.
Quote, six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can't fucking do this anymore, says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as 70% women and 23% T-slur.
He had supported Biden, but, quote, I hate watching the things I say.
I took a much further horseshoe around this time.
Later, a former Bernie supporter, who looked like most Bernie-supporting people one could imagine, No, no, I understand.
The article itself is actually kind of an interesting discussion about this uptightness about language.
I'll read to you one of the closing paragraphs.
Quote.
It's true that over the past few months since Trump was re-elected, I had begun to feel these young conservatives' influence seeping into my own political circles like the substance.
We no longer had any patience for the identity warriors on our timelines.
A friend and I started swapping Megyn Kelly on Instagram.
We thought they were hilarious.
Our favorite was her take on the fires in L.A. The last thing I want to see if I'm in a burning building is A, a woman, and B, an obese woman.
I was unleashed.
The R word.
Fat jokes.
No one, not even the bleeding hearts I know, ever seemed to get all that offended.
The only time I lost friends in the past year for political reasons was debating the war in Gaza, and mostly, even if they wouldn't say it themselves, they chuckled.
Oh my god, you're tacky for that one, one would text me back in those moments.
It felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you're in middle school.
It would do Gavin some good to reflect a little bit on this aspect of his whole thing, but he can't really afford to at this point.
His entire business model is built on the foundation.
of being a middle school bully.
So the way that this article in the New York Magazine is actually kind of wrestling with, you know, uptightness about language.
The ways in which people who seem to really relish this are really just kind of...
The battle that Gavin and his dipshit friends have been fighting is essentially removing the social costs of saying these kind of slurs and behaving in these ways.
Because they're acting like it's a free speech thing, and everybody should be able to say whatever they want.
Right.
But in reality, it's basically meant to mask people having really serious intention of excluding certain groups of people from the public space.
Yeah.
And you can pretend all he wants that, like, it's, oh, we're being funny, but it's not.
Hollywood, and not just the elites, like even the cool hipster crowd, there was a benefit for comedians who were suffering, and they didn't include Jay Johnston, even though the people who were doing the benefit were members of his...
Show, Mr. Show.
And they excluded him from the J6-er, even though no one needs more money in the Hollywood comedy scene than him.
So all of these cool Hollywood comedians, they will be the last to give it up.
Of course, judges in our polluted justice system.
Like with Nick Oaks, who I believe you've had on, Nick Oaks has been, he beat the case.
It wasn't pardoned.
This is before pardoning.
He beat the case.
And now his judge is saying, Well, okay, you beat that charge.
I'm going to bring nine new charges.
This has never been done in American history, where a dead case all of a sudden comes back to life with new random charges thrown in because our justice system is Venezuelan.
So there's no reason that people on Mr. Show need to support Jay Johnson if they don't want to be part of his whole trying to overthrow an election thing.
This kind of comes off as whiny entitlement from Gavin here, and I feel like...
There's a slight difference in being like, oh, let's do a benefit for comedians who are struggling in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters that they've ever had to experience.
But also we should support a comedian who tried to overthrow the United States government.
I mean, there's a piece of me that agrees with that, but then I got lost in thought when you're comparing them to the Rebels of how fucking sad it would be if there's just like...
A hologram of someone being like, Gavin McGinnis, you're our only hope.
I don't like how we have to know their misconceptions.
They'll bring up things in a debate and you'll go, "Wait, what?
I never heard that." And then you have to go look it up and realize, "Oh no, that's BS." Like, "Trump reads Hitler before he goes to bed." Like, "Obama apprehended 10,000 illegals and deported them." Obama had the greatest success rate out of any president ever.
Liberals lie so much, and it's so disingenuous that you end up after a debate with a homework assignment.
So now you have to know what they're talking about.
Like when they said all that stuff that the Howard Stern guy imitating you said, you have to be familiar with that Howard Stern episode now and say, no, no, no, that's a misconception.
So, it really feels like this would be a good time to bring up a podcast that's been running for over eight years, which includes a host who consulted with one of the Sandy Hook cases.
Gavin and Alex are engaging in pure projection here.
The only way they're able to make any points at all is by creating an entirely imaginary world that their arguments get to live in full of code and lore that no one outside of this bubble understands.
If you're someone who took human trafficking seriously but didn't engage with right-wing misinformation circles and social media, you'd have no idea what they were talking about when they started grandstanding about 300,000 missing kids from the border.
It's shorthand for Alex and Gavin, but if you don't know what their narrative is about this, it's very difficult to respond to it on the fly.
They exploit this dynamic as a matter of policy, and now I guess Gavin wants to pretend everyone else is guilty of it.
But essentially he's describing what the experience of listening to Alex's stupid show is.
You have a homework assignment because all this nonsense shit he's rattling off.
Some of the examples that are used here are that Alex peed on someone's grave.
No one's ever seriously alleged this.
One of the parents of a child who was killed at Sandy Hook testified that they'd received harassing mail claiming that the person had peed on their child's grave and that they were going to dig it up.
Alex knows this is monstrous stuff, and that the person who was terrorizing this parent this way was doing so because they were convinced of conspiracies about crisis actors that he profited from promoting.
It would be a serious blow to Alex's ego to accept that he did that, and that this is a side effect of that, that his parent experienced something that no one should ever have to feel.
So instead of taking that blow to the ego, he's come up with a fake version of the accusation that he uses as a straw man to defend himself.
Alex says that he's never peed on a child's grave because it's unrelated to what he's actually accused of, and it allows him to portray his critics as sensationalists.
And I can say with a great deal of certainty, because I've seen a ton of the evidence and discovery material, nothing that Alex was accused of in any of these lawsuits traces back to something that an impressionist said on Howard Stern's show.
A big thing this cult does, too, is they start with these really simple motherhood statements, these platitudes like "love is love." And you go, "That sounds reasonable to me." So a gay man loves a gay man.
Shouldn't they be able to be together?
And I think we're all pretty socially liberal in 2025, so we go...
Yeah, I mean, as long as they're not hurting anyone, sure.
And then you start seeing the corruption creep in, where they're terrorizing some Christian baker or some Christian venue for weddings, and you realize, and their divorce rate is like 95%, and they're not interested in marriage.
What's crazy about all of these people that I've experienced so far up to this point is it's so crazy how it turns out the thing that they want the most in life also happens to be the smartest thing that only rational people would believe.
You know, I wonder how much of this really is, like, a lot of what we're experiencing is a reaction to the internet.
It's a reaction to people who would otherwise never have known these other people existed suddenly being forced into the same public square and realizing that we should not live together.
Probably there's some little piece of that, but then there's another piece of it that more closely implicates Gavin, which is the internet has allowed a lot of people who are vapid and really not that talented to create attention-grabbing stuff.
There's a way to hijack people's attention and make a lot of money off that.
And Gavin's an example of someone who does that in a way that...
It tends towards bigotry.
Yeah.
And the internet wouldn't exist without the internet.
So this is cute, but Gavin's kind of giving up the game here.
There are plenty of people on the left who criticize the government for all of the things that he's bringing up.
He's pretending that voice doesn't exist, and it's a shame because he could really use that tool to keep his debating skills sharp.
But the reality is that he exists in a no-man's land of ideas.
Very few people who take any of this shit seriously would ever talk to him, which leaves his sparring partner roster filled mostly with people who do this stuff primarily for attention and clicks.
That pool is probably going to be largely disappointing, and if Gavin wasn't Gavin, he might have access to a better list of folks to debate, but he has to understand that the low quality of people who would associate with him is kind of his own fault.
He's an embarrassing dude.
To the point where even winning a debate against him is kind of a net negative because you had to be there.
You had to be involved in that with him and that, I don't know, there's a lot of people who really want to do that.
You know, the guys who got Trump elected, you said I helped at the beginning of the show, and I'm sure that's true, but who really pushed him over the edge is these kids that no one's seen.
They're predominantly white.
They're mostly Christian.
You know, they don't drink that much.
They're like 18 to 22. And the only time you saw them during up the election was that one kid who was screaming at the mayor of, was it Philadelphia?
I forget the town.
but he was the mayor was trying to play with the barricades to stop people from having this Trump rally.
And this guy was probably 19. He was tearing the mayor a new ass.
And I met these kids.
I hung out with They didn't want to party as much as I did.
And they were working like 19-hour days nonstop the whole time.
They set up MSG.
They set up all the rallies.
They're the ones behind the scenes.
And they were workaholics who got that, made sure that the trains run on time during that campaign.
And these cruel kids at the table are our future.
And we have to sort of humble ourselves and say, hey, you guys are winning the culture war.
But if you can't fool Penn and Teller, then Penn will give you a little speech at the end where he'll be very complimentary, but he'll sneak in a bunch of like, oh, I see that that was a facepalm thing, and you're like, ah, he knows that he's palming cards.
That's how he knows the thing that's going on.
It does not take several decades of expertise in history or magic.
Really, it takes having seen a Bruce Willis movie to be like, oh, that's Nazi shit right there.
It's like he's been in, you know, a North Korean or North Vietnamese torture chamber literally the last three years and all the hell he's been through.
And so when he's on with Alex, he's talking a bit about how he met a bunch of people in prison and he wants to dedicate moving forward to helping give them a voice.
Okay.
As if all these men that he met are all wrongly incarcerated.
But if he just wants to deal with, like, curceral reform, I'm not gonna be, I don't wanna be a dick about that.
Yeah.
In the same way that when Alex got a DUI and he's like, I'm gonna crusade against unjust DUIs, it's like, well, you're full of shit, but I don't have a problem with what you're saying.
I mean, in a certain sense, there is a part of me that's like, well, I mean, listen, it's not like these are career criminals who are making a life of robbing banks or anything.
There was a very specific reason that they committed that crime, and without that reason, they probably won't commit the same crime on account of you can't.
No, but that's indicative of who is at the core of this, of the problem.
Like, based on just what Joe said, regardless, you know, I can factor in all the things that he's done throughout his life to, like, listen, we're not going to hang out or anything like that.
But that story is...
Something that brings about such a huge amount of curiosity for me, because you are still a human being in this obscene situation.
Like, an incredible situation.
And you can't...
Like, if somebody else told me, oh, whenever Trump went down, I screamed and I fell on my knees, I'd be like, that's stupid.
And just hearing those stories about the stuff that the outside world would happen during World War II, and it would just be, like, a thing that happened before phones, before TV, before anything, and you would just not know, you know?
What a fascinating thing to know in real time that could be...