Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ March 10, 2006 episode—debunking Nostradamus and biblical misquotes as fear-mongering tools, exposing Robert Manciero’s Prescription Suicide doc for cherry-picked family trauma over expert analysis, and Gwen Olson’s anti-drug memoir for spiritualizing mental illness while ignoring clinical realities. The hosts also condemn Jones’ promotion of BlazeMed’s fraudulent cancer treatments, linked to Antonella Carpenter’s 2016 convictions, and contrast his 2006 praise for Ron Paul with the Paul family’s later discredited influence. Ultimately, the episode reveals how Jones weaponizes pseudoscience and conspiracy to profit from panic while evading accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
And Nostradamus wrote about the West Nile virus that Mohamed Atta was going to spread in New York, but it was also part of enabling Giuliani to start a command center in the World Trade Center to respond to the West Nile virus.
See, one of the things that I've learned from listening to these old episodes of Alex's show is that someone like this, you hear that voice and you're thinking, I don't know, 30s.
Sure.
That guy's 80.
There are so many people who have voices that you think like, oh, that's just someone in their 30s or 40s.
So it's also fair that Alex doesn't like Nostradamus.
I'm cool with that.
People who use prophecies to run scams generally don't like other people who are in the same business, so that's cool.
But what's interesting here is that Alex is just making up that this is a fake quatrain.
It's absolutely authentic, and it's from Nostradamus' Century 10 collection, Quatrain number 72.
Alex's belief system relies on magic, so he can't really just dismiss Nostradamus as a weirdo who wrote stuff that people try to force into fitting world events after the fact so they can freak themselves out and pretend that they can know the future by doing the right kind of decoding.
He believes the same shit.
So if he were to just take the position that the idea of the literal prophet is dumb, then he risks attacking his own worldview.
Because he doesn't have other tools that he can use.
Alex just tries to invalidate the caller's question about Nostradamus on a technicality.
It's a fake quatrain, man, brother.
It's a particularly interesting tactic for Alex to use and be wrong about because about 75% of the quotes that he cites in his documentaries and on his shows are fake.
Almost everything he thinks Thomas Jefferson said is misattributed.
And if he's such a stickler about authenticating something like a Nostradamus quatrain, you'd think he'd put a little bit of effort of the same type into Jefferson.
You can hear in this clip Alex describing what his business model develops into.
He makes hundreds of predictions, many of them contradicting each other, and then makes a big deal out of it when something he says appears to have come true, while never owning up to all the times he's wrong.
In fact, he's developed a defense mechanism about this that the psychics he's complaining about don't even get to enjoy, where he'll pretend that some of his past predictions ended up being wrong because he predicted an event and that scared the globalists into not carrying it out.
When Alex describes this dynamic and complains about psychics like this, it should make clear that he knows what he's doing.
He's able to articulate how what they do is a scam, so it's impossible to pretend that he doesn't get it.
Yeah, no, there is definitely an element of like, I guess, celebrity deathmatch should happen where we've got present-day Alex versus 2006 Alex, you know, in a clay fight where both of them are essentially they're yelling the same things at each other.
So we know that Alex now says that God told him in repeated prophetic dreams about 9-11, and that was how he predicted it.
But I guess he's still lying about research and deep study at this point in 2006.
One of the things that I think is pretty fascinating is that Alex is describing his magical abilities in a specific way that's similar to how he plays the game now.
He can do nearly impossible mental math if he's not trying.
But if he's asked to do the math, he can't.
He can spell any word if he's just on autopilot.
But if he's asked to spell anything, he's basically illiterate.
This is how he describes his prophecy powers now, where if God sends him some jolt, he can do magic.
But if you confront him and demand that he tell you what's going to happen in the future, it's probably not going to work.
This is a very old conman trick and has worked pretty well historically because it has a built-in excuse for why the trick didn't work.
The con man isn't really in control of their own magical gifts and any attempt that they might make to prove their powers would require them to exert that control that they don't have.
The other place you see this kind of thing is in adolescence.
Everybody wants to be special and a good way to be special is to have some kind of special power.
The problem is that you don't have one.
But that doesn't stop some creative kids from trying to convince people that they do.
So you come up with something like Kell from Keenan and Kell, his power in mystery men, where he can turn invisible, but only when no one's looking.
Kids tell each other shit like this all the time.
And I don't want to deprive them of their fun.
But if an adult is telling you something like this, you should know that you're either being scammed or you're in a mid-tier Ben Stiller movie.
See, you start to see it's not really that hard to do.
What's hard to do is to just make very few predictions and have all those come correct, which mine have, instead of just making a thousand predictions and a few come true.
So it's complete bullshit that Alex saw Gary Hart on hardball, and that's what finally made all the pieces come together about his 9-11 prediction.
Clinton had enlisted Gary Hart to co-chair a committee on national security in 1998, and their findings included dire warnings about how it was likely that a terrorist attack would be committed on U.S. soil within the next 25 years.
The problem with Gary Hart was that people didn't really respect him.
He was supposed to be the next big Democratic hopeful in 1984 who could make a run at Reagan.
Hart narrowly lost the Democratic primary to Walter Mondale, who went on to get beat about as bad as possible, only winning his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C. Crazy electoral map.
So Gary Hart was the golden boy of the Democratic Party.
And his first real run ended with Mondale getting the shit kicked out of him in historic fashion.
And then the second run led to him looking very weak in the midst of a sex scandal with him choosing to drop out of the race instead of trying to weather the storm.
That led to Michael Dukakis getting the Democratic nomination.
And granted, he did better than Mondale, but he lost to George H.W. Bush 426 to 111 in the Electoral College.
He was a bad messenger for people to hear a warning about imminent terrorist attacks from.
To viewers, he was either someone they didn't know or someone they did know and kind of didn't like.
To Republicans, he was a joke.
And to Democrats, he was the guy who probably would have beat Bush, but couldn't resist fucking on this boat or at least putting himself in a position where Roger Stone's buddy could, you know, run that PR campaign.
Regardless, we know that Alex got his 9-11 prediction from psychic dreams that God sent him.
So this whole act of trying to provide a rational explanation for his prophecy to differentiate it from Nostradamus' work is kind of stupid and looks dumb.
And for it to include Gary Hart in his—OK, like, regardless of whether or not a person watching Gary Hart on this hardball episode that may or may not have happened may be convinced of something terrible.
Alex should not have been convinced of shit by watching Gary Hart on Harpal, right?
Now, I forget the exact verse in what got ignored by the counterfeit of Nostradamus was in the final book of the Bible, Revelation.
It said, to paraphrase, in the great port city of the new Babylon, the great towers will fall.
They'll be covered with dust.
And sea captains will say, Babylon is burning that great center of commerce, and it will have been the place of the trade, the towers of the trade.
I mean, it's an incredible quote.
That was real.
No one wanted to talk about that.
If you want to talk about prophecy, no one wanted to talk about it.
It was just some fake quatrain.
That's the thing people do for Nostradamus is they write fake quatrains, put it on a message board, and it's top news everywhere, even on CNN, taking it serious.
So the part he's talking about begins in Revelation 17 with the talk of the destruction of Babylon.
But the specific thing he's referencing is from Revelation 18, beginning with verse 11 through 13.
Quote, the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her being Babylon because no one buys their cargoes anymore.
Cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, and scarlet cloth, every sort of citron wood and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh, and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and carriages, and human beings sold as slaves.
Babylon was an economic hub on the Euphrates River, so all that stuff about merchants and ship captains is completely understandable without having to make this New York City.
Quote, when they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, was there ever a city like this great city?
They will throw dust on their heads and with weeping and mourning cry out.
That line, they will throw dust on their heads, seems really strange, especially considering how many images we had after 9-11 of people covered in dust.
However, if you read more of the Bible, you would know that the act of throwing dust on one's head is something that's frequently done to express despair.
Job's friends do it to show empathy with his plight.
Joshua does it after receiving news of a military defeat.
And the book of Lamentations contains this verse about the response to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Quote, the elders of Daughter Zion sit on the ground in silence.
They have sprinkled dust on their heads and put on sackcloth.
The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.
Alex doesn't really care about the Bible or Christianity, so he doesn't have a broad spectrum grasp on what any of it means.
He only has an interest in what the Bible says to the extent that he can use it to make his job easier or sound more interesting.
So a reference to an ancient custom of expressing despair is entirely lost on him.
He just sees the word dust and decides that it must be about 9-11.
We just accept these things as having evolved naturally, anthropologically, as opposed to we need to be building time machines to ask these very specific and pointless questions.
My feeling on prophecy is you can't, it's all or nothing with prophecy, right?
Like, you can't have a my prophecy is better than your prophecy guy, because once you admit that somebody's getting prophecies and God can do weird shit at all point in time, even if even turning something that wasn't his into his, if you like, then any prophecy could be true.
Like, okay, so cognitive dissonance, very difficult.
Two opposing ideas, same brain.
Tough to do.
I don't know how to deal with a guy fresh off of saying Mohammed Atta was nerve gassed in one of those planes and that was remote control flied into the thing.
And you're so stupid for believing what some random asshole from the past said.
Hey, you know, that first caller just doing his job as an agent, you know, to try to distract you, you know, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, misdirection, propaganda, you know, taking away the true folks.
See, the feeling that I had more is you're sitting at a bar, someone next to you, there's a guy, and he's aggressively hitting on a lady who is not interested.
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It's fun to listen to an ad read like this and remember that Alex pretended that he was one of the most sought-after voiceover guys before Obama came along and made everyone hate Alex for being white.
This is hacky ad reading, even for 2006.
And it works fine for like local businesses or someone with a tiny budget, but this would be considered pretty bad by professionals.
This is a nice little commercial for a CD-ROM filled with advice about where to bug out when shit goes down.
That seems like a normal enough thing for Alex to be selling.
So at first glance, this doesn't seem all that weird.
But you might notice at the end there, he tells people to call New Millennium to buy this CD-ROM, which also wouldn't sound that weird unless you've listened to a lot of InfoWars.
New Millennium Concepts is the name of the company that makes Big Berkey water filters, which is one of Alex's primary sponsors at this time.
That's a curious detail, and it raises some questions about why a company that produces water filters is also spending ad money to promote a CD-ROM about bug out locations.
It seems outside of what their company was made to do, unless you understand the bigger picture.
New Millennium Concepts doesn't sell water filters because they're passionate about cleaner water or because everyone needs their filters.
They sell water filters because it's a product that's easy to sell using fear.
And Alex's show is a fear-based marketing setup.
Maybe it's not a terrible idea to use a water filter, but there's a difference between trying to sell someone one by explaining the upsides of it and selling them one by yelling about how the water is poisoned and is going to turn you gay.
Alex's content is a feeding mechanism that creates the fear that the products he sells are meant to alleviate.
It's a predatory cycle where his show makes you scared that if you don't buy the water filters, you'll die.
But thankfully, he has a filter company that he can vouch for.
Buy Alex's friends' filters so you can alleviate the anxiety that his content has created.
This CD-ROM operates the same way.
Alex is full of yelling at the audience that it's the end of the world and everything's going to blow up at any moment, which creates a heightened level of fear.
The audience is scared about where they can go to be safe during the societal collapse.
And thankfully, he has a friend who can sell them a CD-ROM full of information all about it.
And it's the same people who sell you the water filters.
Do you think it's worse if the people running the company are making this CD-ROM and essentially it's going like, and you know what else?
You could really use an air filter if you bug out here or a water filter if you bug out here or you know all that stuff.
Or if the people that made the company are like, our water filters are great, but also we're terrified that we're going to need to bug out at any single moment.
You know, like, is it better if the fear from them is real or if they're cynically taking advantage of it?
No, it would be hard to, it would be hard not to wisen up, especially if you were, like, maybe you were afraid, but then shortly after you started making a lot more money, you were less afraid and more willing to cynically exploit people.
One of them is a fellow named Robert, who's a filmmaker.
And he has a new film out that Alex is helping promote.
And he really has been laying a lot of groundwork both in the episode the day before this and the beginning of this episode about how like this guy's the shit.
When I first got into TV, I was a basically a temp.
I walked down the Disney lot.
I had no job whatsoever.
I walked into a building and they go, are you the temp?
And of course I said yes.
And I worked there, worked my way up, became a junior production executive, worked under Katzenberg, was in charge of quite a few films in development, and just got tired of the whole corporate scene because I wanted to go out and make films.
I just walked onto the lot and pretended to be a temp, and then I'm working for Katzenberg.
I'm in charge of a bunch of that's like a person who imagines they like, okay, so I'm an extra on some things, and then I just was so good at that, I'm now starring, I was almost Starlord.
There's a lot of really good critiques people can make about the prescription drug industry.
And if this guy was saying something that was reasonable, then I don't want to just have a knee-jerk reaction to hate him because he's on Alex's show.
In 2006, an entirely sane people could find themselves on InfoWars.
So I want to be careful not to jump to conclusions.
That said, it's important for Alex to present him as a very important filmmaker because the bigger story here is that Robert's film wasn't accepted to play at South by Southwest.
And if he's a big deal in the industry, then that would seem to indicate that the subject he's covering is too hot.
On the flip side, if he's just a guy who showed up as a temp at Disney and is pretending that he was in charge of getting movies made, then it starts to make a lot more sense why South by Southwest might have rejected his film.
Maybe it wasn't good.
Again, I would prefer to have watched it so I could just say that it's not good.
But based on Robert's self-told origin story, my instincts are to say it's probably bad.
From what I understand and was able to glean, I think he's had a totally fine career, but it's mostly been like PSAs and directing things for like local fire departments.
And I think that personalizing mental illness stories can be often pretty helpful.
But I think that there's huge problems with Robert's approach.
The first is that he's doing a documentary that's wildly critical of prescription drugs, and he has no interest in hearing from the pro-medication interview subjects.
Like someone who could give voice to the other side, not interested.
This means that he's not setting out to do a piece that actually gets into medication and whether or not it's helpful.
Instead, it's just meant to be a slice of life kind of thing, looking at people who have had tragedies in their family that revolve around mental health.
The second problem is that he can't interview the people who died from suicide.
He can only hear their perspective through the lens of the family members who were alive.
I'm not saying that the family members don't have a valid story to tell or that their experience isn't important, but I'm saying that they don't know everything.
It's a harsh reality that for a lot of people struggling with mental health issues, their family members can often be a part of why they're struggling.
Parental abuse or neglect can often be a big factor.
And even when that isn't the case, family members are often in complete denial about what someone is going through.
These interviews can provide a humanizing glimpse into what the family members thought was going on with their loved one, but it can't capture what they actually were going through.
Externally, it might have appeared to a mother that their child was getting worse after being on a prescription, but the documentary isn't about that.
It's about blaming medications for people committing suicide.
This documentary is flawed in concept and from an execution standpoint.
Yeah, I mean, the problem with anecdotal stories for mental illness, especially, is sooner or later, you're going to be in there with the doctor and the doctor is going to give you an anecdote.
And it's like, how do you deal with that?
Because the reality is most of the time they work, but nothing works all the time.
And when you're dealing with the brain, that shit's crazy.
So anything might get rewired somewhere.
And every time the doctor is not trying to rewire you in the wrong place, but who fucking knows?
So there's always going to be the most tragic story of a person who is fucking doomed and then the horrible things that happen because people exploit it or don't do it correctly in response, you know?
And the stories, I mean, it's kind of tragic, but the stories of people who respond well to medication and go back to their lives and maybe have their lives saved by a clinical and therapy approach to solve mental health crises.
That's kind of not interesting to people in a documentary.
I think you've correctly identified one of the main problems, which is that at the end of the day, pulling back, the goal of any mental health intervention is to make your life more boring.
So Gwen Olson wrote a book called Confessions of a Prescription Drug Pusher: God's Call to Loving Arms, which is something of a mind fuck in title form.
Her claim to fame was that she was a pharmaceutical rep who got disillusioned with the fact that her job was to try to convince doctors to prescribe drugs more.
She came to view her job as being a drug pusher, and that's all good and well.
Where things get confusing is the part where God is in the subtitle.
It makes total sense that someone would be a pharmaceutical rep and get disgusted with the whole industry of over-prescribing drugs and come out with a tell-all book.
That makes sense.
It's a valid angle to attack big pharma from, and it represents an actual problem that we could work on solving.
The God part is a departure, though, and it raises alarms.
So I read through most of Gwen's book, and it's basically a memoir that's been co-opted into an anti-medication tome.
I think that she's a willing participant in that co-option, but the core of what that book is about could have gone a different direction.
Essentially, she's a person with a very tumultuous family history full of abuse and chaos.
People in her family have not had good outcomes with psychiatric drugs, which she is universalized into a belief that these drugs don't work.
Further, she seems to take issue with what she thinks is a universal belief that mental illnesses are passed on genetically, which gives credence to the idea that the solution to them should be drugs.
Her family shared some mental health struggles, but her take on it is that it's not a genetic condition, it's a spiritual sickness.
I don't really take much issue with that as a basic perspective, and my whole life has been in conversation with mental health issues.
I've met people, including fellow mentally unwell people as well as doctors, and some of them think medication is more important than other approaches, and others don't.
Some think that medication is right for them, and others swear by it.
Some people think I don't really want to mess with that.
But everyone I've ever dealt with understands that there's a role for multiple approaches.
I've never known anyone who thought a pill was a magic solution, but I do understand that that thinking did exist in the past.
What perpetuated that kind of thinking was mostly marketing, where a company would try to brand their new pill as a miracle drug, right up to the extent that the law would allow them to.
Her job as a pharmaceutical rep was to be the salesperson for these drugs.
A different department was in charge of making the ads, but she was the part of the business that was on the ground, asking the doctors, what can I put you down for?
It makes total sense that existing in that world would make you think that the whole mental health approach in the country was based on pushing drugs.
So I kind of don't judge Gwen too harshly for having that perspective.
What she's presenting as the universal position isn't the universal position, but it probably felt that way to her.
So I can see how that, like her coming from that place, is sincere.
When I was doing hearing aids, I've done it in like general clinical areas where you've got an ophthalmologist and you got all that stuff, right?
And so I've seen so many drug reps buy so many lunches.
And it is, it is disillusioning.
Don't get me wrong.
There is no way to see one of those people walk in with like mediocre Chinese food catered and then realize that they're selling like oxycontin by the bucket load.
When things like medications and shit have like gigantic financial incentives attached to them and shareholders and all this shit, it becomes very messy.
So this book is generally, it seems like the story of a person who discovered that non-medication approaches to dealing with mental illness and trauma existed and thinking that no one had ever heard of them.
That seems to be what her journey is.
She worked as a pharmaceutical rep, so she probably wasn't exposed to as many people promoting yoga or meditation, which is being experienced as someone like was trying to cover these things up.
And that just is silly.
It's all great to promote these kinds of things and taking a holistic approach to mental health.
But if I'm being fair, that is not where this book stops.
I agree with her on a very basic premise that she's making about this idea that medication isn't, it's not going to solve all your problems.
But her argument expands to being anti-medication in a way that her story does not earn.
I resent this book, and I think her approach and the impact of that book has done far more damage to people's mental health than anything she did as a pharmaceutical rep. And I'm just going to say this off the bat: that I'm not going to cover too much about what Gwen talks about on the show because a lot of it is about her niece who died from suicide, and that's very uncomfortable.
The niece was struggling with mental illness and drug abuse, and her mom was trying to get her help, which Gwen didn't approve of because it involved medication.
Gwen decided that all of her niece's symptoms were actually being caused by the medications and seemingly appointed herself as the niece's guardian and positioned herself as the enemy of her niece's mom, her sister.
It's honestly all very fucked up, and it's painfully obvious that Gwen projected a lot of her baggage onto the niece in a way that was entirely unfair and probably exacerbated what was already a horrible situation that she was in.
That would explain a lot of people's very vehement views if you think about it for five seconds and go, well, you can either have that vehement view or recognize that you might be partially responsible for a lot of terrible shit.
I do think it's dumb the way that she presents herself as if she's a doctor in the book.
She presents like a lot of, oh, well, I mean, I was selling these drugs to doctors, so I had to get, I had to learn a lot about them just like a doctor.
Back in the early 80s when they approved Prozac, it's admitted now.
And this actually came out a long time ago, right around that time that you were working for them, but it was in a few publications, but not really publicly, widely circulated, that they knew it radically increased suicide around 15%, which is a huge increase.
It was actually a suicide drug.
I mean, it really encouraged it.
That was one of the main effects.
And then here they are pushing it for depression.
Did you ever hear that when you were in the industry?
Did you ever hear anybody criticize?
unidentified
Absolutely not.
In fact, I only heard all of the positive information.
The drugs were non-addicting.
The drugs were benign.
The drugs were not neurotoxic, all of that sort of thing.
I'm not saying that pharmaceutical industry reps don't ever mislead people about their drugs, just that it's not a lie to say that antidepressants aren't neurotoxic.
So there's a lot of studies about antidepressants like Prozac and whether or not they make things like suicidal ideation worse.
Most of it shows no evidence that they cause any increase, but there are some studies that suggest that they might.
Because of that, and because drug companies are very averse to getting sued, almost all medications prescribed for mood disorders have added a warning that say that they could cause an increase in suicidal ideation.
This is less a reflection of a real risk that these medications pose and more of a way for drug handle companies to handle responsibility and spread it out.
If you do a study about people who have depression with notable suicidal ideation and you treat one group with Prozac and another group with a placebo, what outcome might you expect?
Certainly with Alex's belief system, he would expect a higher incidence of suicidal ideation in the Prozac group after treatment because he thinks that the drug causes that, right?
That makes sense.
The problem is that even if you had a study like that and those were the results you got, it would be very hard to untangle all the confounding variables.
You'd have a result that was worth discussing and retesting and looking more into, but you wouldn't have proven anything.
A 2013 paper published in the Journal of Psychological Research hoped to find a way to get rid of some of the more serious confounding variables, primarily how severe depression, if you have it, it can be hard to identify how much of the symptoms are caused by the condition compared to the treatment.
An ideal situation would be to treat non-depressed people with Prozac and see if they got depressed or suicidal, but that study wasn't available and no one's going to do that.
Something kind of close was, though.
A 2004 outpatient study was done with patients suffering from minor depression who had much lower rates of suicidal ideation.
These patients were split into double-blind groups, one being treated with Prozac and the other with the placebo, and they were checked up on for 12 weeks.
Basically, they had those questionnaires that you get and they ask you about your suicidal ideation, rated on a scale of zero to four.
And this paper analyzed the rates that people in the Prozac and placebo groups had increases of one or two points.
They found that people in the placebo group had higher rates of increased suicidal ideation, but the amount was statistically insignificant.
However, there was a wrinkle.
There was no statistical significance in the difference in groups in terms of who had an increase of one or two points.
But if you only included the people who had baseline suicidal ideation at the beginning of the study, people in the group treated with Prozac had significantly less of an increase.
For patients without suicidal ideation before the study, 5.1% of the placebo group had an increase of two points, whereas the Prozac group was 3.5%.
That's not that big of a difference.
For patients who had initial suicidal ideation, 40.9% of the placebo group had increases of two points compared to 12.5% with the Prozac group.
Not necessarily, although the data does tend to support the opposite of Alex's hypothesis.
It seems to suggest that the severity of symptoms is itself a confounding variable to understanding what symptoms could be caused by medications and what could be a part of someone dealing with the condition that the medication is seeking to treat.
There are a ton of studies out there about SSRIs, and I would never pretend to say that all of it says that every drug is safe all the time, but I'm comfortable saying that Alex is lying.
Yeah, I guess it's not really an optimistic thing to say, well, based on just like pure capitalist motivations, they want you to have a shit life, but not die.
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We've talked about it on an episode way back, but just as a brief refresher, LazMed Inc. was a company run by a person named Antonella Carpenter.
She wasn't a doctor, and she lied to people about being able to cure all cancers and eliminate tumors with a laser.
In 2011, she was successfully sued for $2.5 million by a patient she had defrauded.
And in 2016, she was found guilty of 29 counts, including fraud, inducing people to travel and interstate commerce in an effort to defraud them, and wire fraud.
I would take Alex's shit about antidepressants and big pharma a little more seriously if he wasn't accepting ad money from this wildly irresponsible and fraudulent company.
His complaints about how the medical system doesn't take side effects of medication seriously just can't exist in the same broadcast as someone claiming they can use a laser and saline to get rid of all your tumors with no side effects.
One of the things that's particularly chilling about this commercial is that when this all went to court, it was really impossible to tell how many people Carpenter had played a role in killing.
Anyone who went to see her got no treatment at all, but they left being told that they were totally cured.
None of them were cured, though.
And all of them that had malignant tumors got worse.
Seven former patients brought charges against her, and five of them were dead before she faced trial.
As I read to you this passage from an article in Tulsa World about this lady's trial. Quote, the daughter of one patient who died after being treated by Carpenter in 2006 said Carpenter screamed at her and hung up the telephone after she called to say her father was paralyzed on his right side and the cancerous tumor had broken through his skin.
It's entirely possible that that person heard about her through Alex's show.
I mean, the side effects thing is such a difficult one to pin down because anything that is a consequence of something, we also describe as a side effect of something.
You know, so it is like, oh, we can get rid of your tumor with no side effects is insane because just by virtue of something growing inside of you and then removing it, there will be side effects to that, to having it removed.
It's like when you meet somebody who's just truly a predator.
You know, like, this is a person who just feeds on people.
At no point in time, how could you even like look somebody in the face after zapping them with a laser and then they tell you that their tumor's bigger and be like, ah, that guy's an idiot.
Yeah, that is a person who is just fucking that's the type of crazy where it's like, oh, you're not crazy, but you're the craziest person I've ever met in my entire life.
And it's just good to remember that Alex is doing this episode that is so much about attacking the institution of like medical-based mental health interventions.
And he's willing to take money from this malicious predator asshole who is allowing people to get worse with their cancers for money.
They've introduced a resolution already, and it would be both because they're angry just for general political reasons, but they really, really would like to get payback for what Republicans did with Clinton.
So if they get a majority in the House, I believe they'll take it up in a very serious manner.
Well, after the 2016 election, a little bit down the road, Webster Tarpley wrote that essay about how the Paul family was the vestibule that led into fascism and how the falling apart of the libertarianism that they had created allowed for, like, because it was ultimately shown to be fairly empty and destroyable.
And that vacuum allowed Trump to suck all them up.
But yeah, I think that there's something fun about Alex interviewing his idol here in 2006 and expressing the polar opposite of what he believes now about restraining the executive and the imperial president needing to be punished and liberty and all this shit.
And she was getting married to a guy and was apparently pretending to be saving herself for marriage and then cheated on him with Elijah Schaefer, who was married and had kids.