52: July 14-21, 2015

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Today, Dan tells Jordan all about the fourth installment in his investigation into what happened to convince Alex Jones to sign up with Team Trump. In the last episode, we learned that Alex felt that Trump was a "predator," a "shill," and clearly mob-connected, so how does his opinion come to change? Topics covered on today's episode:

• Alex "intentionally" "jumps the shark" (?)
• Alex is fooled by criminally edited anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda videos
• A caller convinces Alex that Jade Helm is real, and that the UN is operating out of a Walmart in Alabama

Tidbits

• Alex covers Planned Parenthood selling baby parts
• Dan starts reading Alex's foundational books
• Jade Helm
• Alex jumps the shark
• Alex fake throws up in his mouth
• Rex Jones makes on air debut

Detailed Show Notes

The world on July 14, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 14th:

• Alex announces that he's bringing back the 4th hour of his radio show, which means we are one step closer to AIDS-truther and all-around medical skeptic Jon Rappoport showing up. Alex conceives of the 4th hour as an "intense news roundtable," and constantly pitches it like it's going to be hard-hitting straight up news and analysis. To put it politely, there is a lot lost between his conception and his execution.
• Alex explains why he's becoming more religious lately. This would probably be impossible to type out, so the clip is provided below.
• Alex conducts an interview with Larry Elder, which is the first instance of Alex talking to someone with decidedly pro-Trump feelings. Larry Elder is not someone I would be taking too much guidance from, considering the following two clips, where he defends Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments, and implies that the Charleston shooting wouldn't have been so bad if everyone were armed. It is the definition of missing the point on both counts.
• Alex suggests that President Obama is to blame for racial strife in the country.
• Alex reveals that he did not pay for the abortions that he has claimed to have paid for in the past (and did a lot of soul searching and praying about and forgiven himself for).
• Alex has an interview with "biggest whistleblower ever" Tosh Plumley. It is largely about Benghazi, and how that was an elaborate gun-running operation gone wrong. Most of their conversation is thoroughly debunked talking points and baseless speculation.
• Lee Ann McAdoo hosts the 4th hour.

David Knight hosted, so we don't know what the show is about.

However, we're gonna guess it was about the Jade Helm 15 exercises, since they kicked off that day. We hate to speculate, but we bet that Alex took the day off just in case Jade Helm was real.

The world on July 16, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 16th:

• Alex announces that he has been doing a lot of soul-searching about Trump, and teases explaining what that means for most of the show. As it turns out, what this means is that Alex still doesn't trust Trump, but that he is going to stop bringing up that he is a mob-connected, slimy casino owner. What changed his mind was apparently watching a couple YouTube videos over the past weekend. It becomes clear, in hindsight, that someone told him to stop talking about the mob ties. Alex makes clear that he doesn't endorse him, just that he's going to stop talking shit. Given the astounding levels of self-censorship Trump has bullied the press into imposing on themselves, I would not be surprised if this was an early example of that.
• Alex explains that no one else can see the Globalists because they are incapable of seeing such evil or even admitting that kind of evil exists in the world. This is insane.
• The Center For Medical Progress has begun releasing heavily edited anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda videos, and Alex cannot get enough of them. The videos would go on to net their creators multiple felony charges for videotaping people without their consent (all those charges are still pending at the time of this writing). They likely committed many other crimes, including a possible racketeering charge for creating a fake company for the purpose of fraud, but a lot of that still has yet to be worked out in court. The important thing is that the videos they released were found to be misleadingly edited to make it appear that the subjects of the videos were haggling over the price of baby organs, which they were not. The other important thing is that Alex Jones falls for it hard, and spends the next months of his show screaming about their videos.
• One of the themes of his complaints about the Planned Parenthood videos is an underlying classist dog-whistle, wherein he consistently attacks the women in the videos for being at "high end restaurants" and drinking "fine wines," when nothing in the videos even indicates that they are in such a place or drinking anything other than table wine. It is clear that he is doing this to try to take his audience's anger at the upper-class "elites" and merge it with their hatred of people who support abortion.
• Alex claims that he never said that Jade Helm was real, and that anyone saying such things should be ashamed.
• Then, at the end of the show, he gets a call from someone in Alabama who claims that armed UN agents attacked him at a Walmart, and Alex offers to fly out that night. Spoiler alert, he does not follow through with this.
• Jesse Ventura calls in and has what seems like a very healthy perspective on Trump, and the consequences of his rhetoric.

The world on July 17, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 15th:

This episode is so insane, that I cannot cover it in bullet points. It is perhaps the weirdest thing that I have ever experienced watching months and months of The Alex Jones Show, and even now as I type this out, I find it mystifying. July 17th...The Day Alex Jones Intentionally Jumped The Shark

I know exactly what Alex was trying to do in this episode. It's pretty clear that what he wants to do is cast himself as Jonathan Swift as he makes his very own Modest Proposal, but Alex does not realize that he is not making a logical point at all. He thinks he's making a shocking statement that's backed up by logic, but in reality, he's just exposing his own poor grasp on reality and his extreme hatred of Muslims.

In his essay, Swift used the suggestion of the poor selling their babies to be eaten by the rich as a way to highlight and mock how horribly the rich treated the poor already. It is an exaggeration made by heightening an already existing problem.

Conversely, Alex Jones' "modest shark jump" is him calling for the deportation of every Muslim, the banning of all mosques, and all Muslim symbols, ostensibly using the logic that "some people want to ban the Confederate flag, so why not ban all Muslim things?"

Here, he falls into a number of logical traps. I will list them out for you:

• • In order for this to be satire (he claims that he is not being satirical, he is just using logic, but I disagree), he would need to be satirically advocating a position that he does not already tacitly support. He has many times in the past expressed deeply held feelings of distrust toward the Muslim community, and has often conflated radical terrorists with the general Muslim population. This is not an instance of him making a headline-grabbing statement to point out a social problem, it's him reaching the logical conclusion of his beliefs. He wants to outlaw Islam, and is using this weak argument as a shield to give him cover to express that.
  • If he wants to use this "Shark Jump" to start a conversation, it's a flawed premise. He acts like people want to ban the Confederate flag, therefore it makes sense for him to call for other iconography to be banned. But, the reality is that people were calling for Confederate flags to be taken down from government buildings, so the only real outcome that can come from this conversation is the conclusion that Islamic flags should also not be flown at government buildings, which I think most people already agree on.
  • Even if people were calling for the banning of the Confederate flag, which they were not, it still doesn't logically track for that to be analogous to banning Islamic iconography. In order for them to be equivalent, Alex would need to first make the argument that the Confederate flag was a religious symbol, and the Confederacy a religion, thereby making them logically relatable. I grant, flying a Confederate flag on your property is protected as free speech, but the argument of "they want to ban A, so I suggest we ban B too" doesn't work under these conditions. Also, people weren't trying to ban the Confederate flag.
  • But, Alex is not just calling for the banning of Islamic iconography. In his thought experiment, he is proposing essentially outlawing a religion, which he sees as being analogous to banning a Confederate flag. Just taken in terms of scale, this is pretty unfair as far as comparisons go.
  • He tries to use logic to make his argument, but he clearly has no experience in using actual logic. If you don't look at what he's saying, and you're already a bigot, his words may make sense to you. The problem is, the argument he's making is substantially more complicated than he thinks it is, as I attempt to lay out below:
• Premise A: Terrorism being carried out by Muslims hurts people ("A Muslim has hurt someone")
• Premise B: The Charleston shooting carried out by a white person hurt people ("A white person has hurt someone")
• Premise C: All white people are blamed for the actions of one white person in the Charleston Shooting ("If one white person has hurt someone, all white people are to blame")
• Premise D: If all white people are blamed for the Charleston Shooting, then all Muslims should be blamed for things that any individual Muslim does.
• Premise E: If a group is blamed for the actions of an individual member of their group, that group has hurt people.
• Premise F: If a group has hurt people, then their symbols should be blamed and banned.
• Conclusion: All mosques should be closed, all Muslim symbols should be banned, and all Muslims should be deported.

This argument just doesn't work, for any number of reasons. First, the conclusion in no way follows from the premises. If all he wanted to do was ban Muslim symbols, then at least the conclusion makes sense from that standpoint, but he in no way introduces the idea of deportations and closing of mosques into the premises.

More importantly, the premises also just aren't true. In order to have a sound argument, you need to have true premises that logically lead to a true conclusion, which is a bar Alex has failed to reach.

All white people weren't blamed for Charleston, what happened was that many took it as an opportunity to examine the devastating effect the history of white supremacy has had in this country, and how that mentality has not disappeared at all. It was an opportunity to reflect on how differently people of different races experience day to day life, and wrestle with the fact that, as white people, we possess a lot of advantages that we have not earned, and those advantages have roots in our country's white supremacist history. This is not the same as blaming all white people for the actions of Dylann Roof, so Premise C is out. It's also what's known as a composition fallacy.

Premise D is stupid, since it's just really extending the composition fallacy.

Just for fun, I'd like to point out that using his argument, it would follow that since listeners of his program have hurt people in the past, the InfoWars logo should be banned, and he (along with all his listeners) should be deported. You see, when you use a composition fallacy, you open up the door for it to be used against you. It's a filthy business, this logic.

I choose not to even engage with Premise F, and how reductive and offensive it is that Alex would imply that the Confederate flag is somehow important iconography for all white people.

It's all a mess, and yes, I did break down that argument just to prove to myself that studying logic in college wasn't a complete waste.

All that said, what makes the "Shark Jump" a complete embarrassment is that, as he prepares to reveal his bizarre, logically flawed proposal, he paves the way with a bunch of stories that he thinks are building up his argument, but in reality, he's just lying about all of them.

Now, let us walk through this "Shark Jump" piece by piece, taking a break to debunk his stories as they come up.

While Alex has a bit of a fair point that terror threats are used to peel back our civil liberties, that is the last thing I can agree with him about here. In the first leg of this trip, Alex builds up how important what he's about to say is, then insists that he's not using satire, which again I insist he is, just poorly.

He ends by claiming that "brown bags are being banned in Seattle" because they hurt some people's feelings. This is not true. Here is the story he is basing that on.

The term "brown bag" does have a racially loaded past, in that in the past, people's skin was compared to brown bags to see if they were light enough to be admitted into bars, social events, etc. The story that Alex is referring to is an in-office memo that someone wrote suggesting that people be conscious of this, and asking that people use comparable words that mean the same thing when discussing lunch meetings (sack lunch, for example), that wouldn't possibly make a coworker have to remember that term's history. It was not even a ban on the words, it was just a suggestion that people be considerate.

In this next chunk, Alex lies about another story about someone suggesting that people be considerate.

He claims that "nationwide" children are being banned from using the words boy and girl, and that, in order to make sure no trans students feel hurt, everyone must be called "purple penguins." This is an incredibly misleading version of the truth, which can be found here.

Because Alex uses the term "purple penguins," it is very easy to track this back to the original story. It is not something that is "happening nationwide," and once again, no one is banning anything. What is actually happening is that a group called Gender Spectrum offered guidance to a school district in Nebraska about ways to make sure that all students are made to feel included in their classrooms.

The guidance included suggestions that mainly had to do with not gendering things that did not really need to include genders. For instance, if you are having children line up, don't separate them as boys and girls, but instead have them split up based on whether they like dogs or cats, or prefer reading or drawing. It is not a way of erasing gender, just a way of trying to not use gender as a dividing binary when it doesn't need to be.

The advice goes on to suggest that when a teacher is trying to get a group of children's attention, saying "listen boys and girls" is just injecting gender binaries where they don't need to be as well, and could make children outside the gender binary feel excluded. It is just as effective to give your classroom a team name, such as "purple penguins" (the throwaway example they used), and use that to get the kids' attention.

Again, this is not an instance of outlawing or banning language, it's just an advocacy group suggesting ways to slightly tweak ways things are expressed to make sure that all children are cared for and made to feel welcome. No one is erasing or banning gender. Just because Alex Jones thinks empathy is a Globalist plot, that does not mean it is.

In this clip, Alex makes his actual argument, that if people want to ban the Confederate flag, then Islam should be banned. This, even as an intentional exaggeration, is absurd. We went over that already, so no need to dwell on it further here.

He punctuates his argument by claiming that police are showing up to flea markets to arrest people who are selling "rebel flags." This is a complete lie. Here is the story that he is basing this on. I know this is the story Alex is talking about because it happened two days before this episode.

A Connecticut man went to a flea market and saw a vendor selling Nazi and Confederate items, and was offended, so he called the police. The police showed up, and did nothing because no law was being broken. The vendor was not punished in any way.

The thing that Alex leaves out of the story, conveniently, is that the man who called the police did so because of the Nazi stuff, not the Confederate flag. You see, this man's grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who had numbers tattooed on her from the camps. His response of being overwhelmed is completely understandable. Perhaps he went a little far in calling the police because of it, but that's irrelevant, because the cops didn't oppress or arrest the vendor. They affirmed his right to sell whatever he wants.

Every piece of evidence Alex sites in order to prop up his rhetorical comparison is a complete misinterpretation of the truth. He is building up a case of lies about "politically correct oppression" that he then uses to justify his argument that, essentially, Islam should be banned.

This is unbelievably idiotic, only made worse by the fact that he clearly planned out this speech pre-show and really thought he was on to something. In the end, it is all just an embarrassing exercise in a man trying to justify his own bigotry, using pretend intellectual language and hiding behind false equivalences. Matters are only made worse that he decided to do so with this as his backdrop:

A shark was jumped today Alex, just not the one you think.

The world on July 19, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 19th:

• Most of today's show is about how a picture of the Queen giving a Nazi salute, as a child, came out. Alex uses this as an opportunity to launch the world's largest "I told you so" party. There are a lot of problems with this, chief among them that Elizabeth was 7 when this picture was taken in 1933. In the video, she is clearly being made to make the salute by her Nazi-sympathizing uncle Edward. As weird as it is to think now, a lot of people had Nazi sympathies before WWII really got cooking, there were a number of prominent people who were on Hitler's side to some extent. Also, this picture is kind of irrelevant, because Prince Edward abdicated the throne in 1936, assuring that his lineage would never be monarchs ever again, because he wanted to marry an American lady that the British government didn't approve of. Pointing out that a 7 year old made a gesture because their misguided uncle got them to does not prove shit.
• Apparently, shock-jock Mancow called Alex to congratulate him on being right about the British nobility. Full disclosure: I was once a guest on the Mancow program, and he was nothing if not a complete jerk. The experience was unbelievably awful, and based on how Mancow carried himself, I absolutely believe that he's the type of person who would be in contact with Alex Jones
• Without providing any further details, Alex Jones asserts that President Obama is creating a "race database," which presumably would be used nefariously.
• Alex continues to push the Center For Medical Progress propaganda videos against Planned Parenthood. Investigations have shown that these were all deceptively edited, and Congressional investigation have cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrong-doing, but Alex spends over a month screaming about them almost every day.
• Alex explains that John McCain did not actually get tortured in Vietnam, and that in fact he was a "trustee of the Hanoi Hilton." Whereas McCain likes to play up his war past for sympathy and political points, Alex knows that in reality, he spent most of the war being pampered by the North Vietnamese and enjoying the company of "pleasure women." This narrative is both fascinating and very offensive simultaneously.

The world on July20, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 20th:

• Most of this show is about Alex's narrative that he's building that the British nobility are: A) secretly Nazis, and B) literal descendants of Dracula. Alright, that's not fair. I should say, literal descendants of Vlad the Impaler. Most of what Alex is referencing goes back to a Romanian tourism campaign that was trying to entice people to Transylvania (a part of Romania) by highlighting Prince Charles' distant relation to Vlad. Considering the way genealogy works, if you go back six centuries, you may be surprised to find the bizarre familial connections people have, and quite frankly, given that Vlad had at least three recorded sons and had a period of military adventurism against the Ottoman empire, it's very reasonable to think that he had far more offspring than that, giving him a potentially large lineage.
• Alex Jones discusses the nature of fear and how standing up to fear is what separates boys from men. To illustrate this philosophy, he discusses how, in his school days, he was not afraid to skinny-dip with the cheerleaders, whereas other kids were. The story he's telling is likely not true, but even if it is, it is not really demonstrative of "overcoming fear."
• Alex claims that "Islam has always been about conquest." To back up his claim, he points out that Islam is everywhere, which is evidence of its conquest-filled past. He fails to point out that there is at least one other religion with a pretty serious history of conquest that can now be found everywhere.
• Alex announces that he is launching a TV network, but the details are vague. What's not vague is that he needs a ton of money to do it, so he spends a lot of the show asking for people to buy his products and "fund the operation."
• Alex has an interview with his newly-hired investigative reporter Wayne Madsen. The interview is about how the Clintons' personal chef was found dead, apparently with a note on him that said to call Larry Nichols if anything happened to him. Madsen asserts that the chef somehow had inside information about the truth about 9/11, and he knew too much, so once Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for president, the chef had to be taken out. It's all a lot of sensational nonsense.

The world on July 21, 2015:

• Coming Soon

What Alex covered on July 21st:

• Alex begins a pretty short-lived narrative where he believes that Army recruiting centers around the country are under attack, mostly because they are gun-free zones. In order to beef up the story, Alex sends Joe Biggs down to an Austin-area Army recruitment center, where he and about 3 other people, stand guard with guns outside to protect the recruiters. No one attacks, and Alex loses interest in this narrative pretty quick.
• Alex has fallen for more deceptively edited anti-Planned Parenthood videos put out by the Center For Medical Progress. This will come up pretty much every day for a while.
• Alex admits that he has met the NY mafia. He has also said that he knows that Donald Trump is a front for them.
• Alex spouts out one of his favorite lies, that Snopes is run by "a lady and her cat." He desperately needs to discredit Snopes, since anything that involves fact-checking works against Alex's purposes. He can't really argue with what they do, so he has to attack who they are (at least who they are in his head). Snopes is not run by a lady and her cat. They have a full staff of editors, writers, fact-checkers, and support staff. This is simply an instance of Alex making shit up to try to attack people who prove that he just makes stuff up.
• Alex reveals that he prefers to take Super Female Vitality to Super Male.
• Alex's 12 year old son Rex is on the show to present a special report about how environmentalists are stupid. He does a fine job making a video, for a sixth grader, but this is incredibly inappropriate for Alex to be doing, both as a broadcaster and as a father.