In Knowledge Fight #1116, Dan and Jordan mock Alex Jones’ 2006 episode, where he falsely claims Slobodan Milosevic’s death was poisoning by "globalists" for exposing Al-Qaeda ties—ignoring his trial for ethnic cleansing. They critique Jones’ shifting conspiracy theories, like accusing colleges of brainwashing students into hating America post-Obama, while earlier praising their "purity." Pastor Davidson Lohr’s 2006 "sloppy" 9/11 claim and later Trump support reveal Unitarian Universalism’s political fractures. Jones’ refusal to take accountability, even on abortion, underscores his pattern of exploiting outrage over nuance. [Automatically generated summary]
This morning was the first couple of times, like the last couple of days was the first time that I gotten to take the dogs out without shoes in the morning for a long time.
My bright spot, I guess, is that because it's still been a little bit cold and I haven't been able to go to the woods, I have started replaying Pikmin.
might be a deeper relationship maybe you know maybe by the time pikmin 5 comes around you'll be i don't know if they'll ever make a pikmin 5 yeah Yeah, probably.
I think of all the things that I was expecting, the first one that we were going to hear wasn't going to be something that was like, I'm kind of on Slobodan Milosevic's side.
So part of the reason that the trial went on as long as it did was because Milosevic was in such poor health.
This is explained in the report on the investigation of his death.
Quote, the trial was interrupted frequently during the prosecution case because of Mr. Milosevic's health.
In August 2002, the trial schedule was reduced on the recommendation of the cardiologist treating Mr. Milosevic, Dr. Van Dickman, to allow four consecutive days of rest every two weeks of trial.
This was further reduced in September 2003 on the advice of Dr. Van Dickman to a trial schedule of only three days sitting a week.
They did a full toxicology report and found that there was no sign of any poisons in his system, just the regular medications that he was prescribed for things like blood pressure.
There's one interesting wrinkle, which is that a blood sample taken from him in January, two months prior to his death, did have traces of rifampicin in it, which wasn't prescribed.
This is an antibiotic that's used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis, but it can have a side effect of making drugs meant to deal with hypertension less effective.
It's unclear how he would have gotten this drug without it being prescribed since he was into prison, but it provides a possible explanation for how Milosevic could have been at a greater risk of heart attack at that time.
The autopsy and toxicology report done after his death showed that he didn't have any rifampicin in his system, though.
So it's unlikely that him having a heart attack that weekend, it's unlikely that it could have been caused by an antibiotic making his hypertension meds less effective.
Right, right, right.
But two months prior, there was that blood test, and that's interesting, and that's where the poisoning argument comes from for Alex.
Yeah, and in terms of this poisoning argument, I would say that it's less like a coincidence, the way you're saying, but it's unrelated to the cause of it.
Him having that in his system is not a coincidence.
Milosevic wanted to be given a provisional release to get medical treatment in Russia, presumably as some part of a plan to flee there and hide in exile.
So he didn't comply with his prison medical team, but was getting outside medical attention smuggled to him, which he took in the form of him not taking various things that he was prescribed and taking other things that he wasn't prescribed that people had brought in to the prison for him.
And one of the things, if you read through the full report on his death, there were unprescribed medications that he was taking that someone had snuck into him in the prison that were things that the doctors tried to get him to take, and he had refused.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I understand totally not taking something prescribed and then taking the exact same thing from somebody that you trust who gave it to you.
Especially, but that's because you're crazy, right?
If you're at The Hague with your own private room, you're being taken care of so much better than you have any right to be.
So Alex is talking about the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995.
That war was a piece of the larger fallout from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which led to the creation of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This was a country that had a largely split population with the major blocs of Bosniaks and Serbs, who were Muslim and Orthodox, respectively, and a minority population of Croats who were mostly Catholic.
The Serb population of the country did not support the unified independent government of Bosnia and Herzegovina and had a separatist streak aligning with the country directly to their east, Serbia, whose president was Slobodan Milosevic.
Simultaneously, the Croats and Bosniaks didn't really get along and they were fighting each other, which helped make it easier for the Serbs to take over most of the country with the aid of Milosevic.
The picture that Alex is talking about from the cover of Time magazine was of a man named Fikrat Alek, who was at the time being held at the Ternopols camp, which was a Serb-run prison, not a food depot.
This was in 1992, and word had reached the media about a concentration camp called Omarska, where Croats and Bosnian Muslims were alleged to be being held and tortured.
The Serbs offered to allow Western media to come in to tour Omarska and see how wrong this story was.
And while they were there, journalists uncovered that detainees had been taken from Omarska to other more obscure detention centers in advance of their visit.
He had just arrived there recently because of the reshuffling around of detainees.
After speaking to the media, Fikrat Alec was targeted and likely would have been killed had he not managed to escape from that camp, where only four days later, over 200 people were executed, including his cousin.
So the KLA or the Kosovo Liberation Army is an entire different piece of this history.
They were an Albanian separatist group that had wanted to be independent from Yugoslavia and then Serbia after Yugoslavia broke up.
This has to do with the Kosovo war that went from 1998 to 1999, which also involves Slobodan Milosevic, but is different than the Bosnian war, which was the situation that led to that Time magazine cover that Alex was complaining about in the last clip.
This was a war that was taking place within Serbia, since Kosovo is a territory that was then in Serbia.
So Alex can make an argument that Milosevic's atrocities against the KLA and the Albanian population in Serbia is a justified measure meant to keep the country together.
Yeah, of this, I know very little of this chunk of history in this region.
Of what I do know, it has been like the only what learning what I have known only makes it clear that if I wanted to learn the story, I would have to spend the rest of my life trying to learn the story.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, trying to say I'm an expert on this situation is a terrible idea.
So it's just the same thing over and over and over again.
He had a sovereign nation.
I don't agree with his politics, don't agree with his views, don't agree with a lot of things.
And he was not playing ball with the globalists, and he wouldn't let the New World Order banking system take over, just like what's happening in Venezuela right now.
And so in 2000, they staged a CIA coup and overthrew him and killed and assassinated and arrested most of his former ministers.
And they've broken the country up and the place has been bombed with DU and the birth defects are almost quadrupled.
Our troops have tripled, but they're not ever in country as long as they've tripled from the first Cold War, but there's a right at a quadrupling.
You know, if the globalists really, really wanted Serbia, I'm, I, listen, I'm sorry to the Serbian people who are going to suffer for it, but, you know, they can get rid of Milosevic.
I suspect that this is all a case where Alex identifies with the Serb population because he sees them as the most white and because they're orthodox, which is something that we've seen him show a lot of support for in more recent times when talking about Russia.
For Alex, ethnic cleansing is a legitimate means of trying to defend a country if the circumstances are right.
Him yelling about how Milosevic is innocent of what he's been buddy.
Yeah, it is really interesting in the context, like looking back, you know, there's so many times we look back and we're like, see, this would never be compatible with what he's saying today.
But this is very clearly like, oh, yeah, this is the guy.
This is the guy we're talking about today.
This guy right here being like, what's the little ethnic cleansing between friends?
And it is wild to think that like when you're listening to this in 2006, you're listening to it going like, what a crazy take from this wild guy and not going like, if I stop and think about what he's saying, it is that ethnic cleansing is a defense.
So what makes this particularly insane is that later in his career, Alex would begin interviewing Dr. Francis Boyle as an expert on bioweapons.
And a large part of his credibility was based on his involvement in the prosecution of Milosevic.
If you go back and read interviews Boyle did, he was real clear.
Quote, it was Milosevic exploiting nationalism and ethnicity and religion to accomplish his objective of greater Serbia.
Just like Hitler wanted Liebenstrom to the east, Milosevic wanted Liebenstrom to the west.
He was using all that and exploiting it.
One concern that I'm getting when I listen back to this, and I think it's pretty easy to put this in its proper place with what you were saying of like, this is the guy.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose when you say, like, he doesn't know which is which, I imagine if you asked him to draw on a map what any of it looked like, or even like just a couple of circles for relative size or relative population, or like who's where, or where from, he would have no idea about any of it.
This story is about a guy named Davidson Lohr, who was a pastor at a Unitarian Universalist church.
One day he read the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman and he decided he was sick of the bullshit and delivered a sermon that was mostly about economic policies carried out by world powers against developing countries.
The text of the sermon is available on the church's website, but when I read it, I was surprised that there wasn't any talk about 9-11.
When I got to the end, I did notice this footnote.
Quote, when I originally delivered this sermon on the 12th of February 2006, I had added a section on 9-11 expressing my belief that agencies of our own government had orchestrated the attacks of 9-11.
But that suggestion was and is so shocking, so repulsive, that it would take a very convincing exposition to make it at all persuasive, and I didn't do that.
It was a sloppy and slapdash edition that I shouldn't have tacked on, as several members of my church were quick to point out.
During the next two weeks, I removed that section and rewrote it pretty much from scratch, creating a standalone essay.
That essay, however, is not a sermon, not about religion, and I am not comfortable having it on our church's website.
Jim, I know that you don't have any feelers or the lines you've got out there haven't gotten triggered on exactly where Bilderberg's going to be this year, but give us any ideas you've got.
And then for those that don't know, why is Bilderberg important?
And kind of tell us what their agenda is and what they're up to.
And if Jim had just waited a little while, he could have read announcements about it in the paper.
I understand that part of the game here is pretending that this is a secret meeting that they try to pull off without the Nazi press knowing where they're going to be, but that's a little bit silly.
Interestingly, this year, this is the one where it's in Canada, and Alex ends up going to bullhorn the rich people.
Yeah, and losing sight of that is a little bit strange.
You don't have to be so contrarian that you're trying to rehab the image of Slobodan Milosevic because he also doesn't like the world order that you oppose.
You know, I was thinking about that, and it is that kind of like, there is a place in our society that we've allowed for somebody to imagine themselves to be like strictly intellectually talking about this.
There are reasons to defend Slobodan Milosevic, that kind of thing.
But defending Milosevic based on his actions weren't that bad or he had the right to do it, you just are getting yourself in a position where there's nothing you should be offended by.
Yeah, I go to college, and I take an international relations class, and I take a Western civilization class.
And, you know, I've been listening for a couple of years and researching this stuff.
You know, especially my international relations class, like, I stop sometimes to correct them on certain things and ask, you know, just like last guest about the Bilderbergs and stuff.
And all of a sudden, he stops.
He's like, you ought to stop for the conspiracies and all that.
I'm like, wait a second, it's not a conspiracy here.
I believe in college for engineering or mathematics or scientific things you're going to need.
I mean, that's really a true science.
But so much of the stuff you're going to learn, you know, going to their schools of economics or going to their international affairs schools, it's just teaching you the mindset to go be a cog and a fraud.
So it's weird how Alex is so against the idea that colleges teach people that the government created the solar system and all that, because that's not true.
What Alex is talking about here, it's just a transparently dumb view of higher education, but it's also one that's completely at odds with Alex's more recent take on college.
Apparently, here in 2006, the schools are there to brainwash you into thinking that the government's never done anything wrong, but now they're brainwashing centers to make you hate America and think our government has always been evil.
I could talk about this all day, but the basic gist of all this boils down to the truth that more widely available, higher quality education threatens the existence of the extreme right wing as a valid political party and would severely cut into the audience space that Alex's advertisers depend on.
Education will always be evil to them, and you should always do your own research, but the context and why and what they're doing is always a game.
Because I can imagine in this international relations class, the guy is given a lecture, teacher's given a lecture, and this guy's like, what about the Bilderberg group?
And the teacher accurately assesses, oh, this is signaling to some kind of a conspiracy belief.
So, and let's not talk about this in class or whatever.
And then that response is interpreted by this guy as him saying that the Bilderberg group existing is a conspiracy, as opposed to like, no, you just believe a lot of dumb stuff that Alex has yelled about.
Yeah.
And I think that if you're in this class and the teacher is saying, hey, this is conspiracy shit, you should be inspired to be like, I'm going to write the best paper fucking ever.
I'm going to show you all this stuff.
And then the teacher will probably fail you because you've cited Paul Joseph Watson on it.
No, I mean, the best stuff that humanity has created, I would say at least 30% of it was created just because some asshole was saying, was talking shit.
Like, somebody talked shit and then was like, well, you know what?
It's like, what looks like contrarianism can also be just at being an asshole.
You know, but if you're, if you have such a, if you have good enough optics, you can conceal that you're just an asshole and make it look like you're a contrarian.
But if you just killed someone, like if I walked out on the street and I killed someone and then I repented and God forgave me, I would still be in fucking trouble.
Yeah, and Alex seems to have avoided any of the real consequences that he wants to attach to the idea that this is murder because his pretend absolution is possible just like that, very easily.
Is it should be like, okay, if you go to get a small business loan and you have like a plan for your business and it's just an explanation of how Alex's career works, they'd be like, Yeah, I guess that is probably pretty profitable, isn't it?
Blaming everybody else seems like a very profitable proposition.
I mean, it is like one of those things where it does feel like you're revealing your inability to view things by assuming other people view it like that.
Like, I assume people are a lot smarter than people behave.
Like, there's plenty of different situations where you should assume that people are being very smart.
And if you're assuming, like, nobody else understands how party politics work, then you're an asshole.
How long he got away with it is like, it does feel like when we go back to the past, there has to have been a lot more willful looking away from what he was doing.