142: March 23, 2018

Listen to this episode on Libsyn Spotify, Read the Unofficial Transcript

### Persons Mentioned

Matt Riggs, HR McMaster, John Bolton, Roger Stone, Vladimir Putin, Stephen Colbert, Thomas Middleditch, Francis Boyle, David Hogg

### OOC Drop

Bernie Impression

Today, Dan is joined by "Fill-In Jordan" Matt Riggs to discuss the March 23rd episode of the Alex Jones Show. Today we learn that Roger Stone has convinced Alex that Trump hiring John Bolton is totally cool, that Alex is worried about getting bullied by a high school student, and that Silicon Valley is a conspiracy.

## Tidbits

* Guest Host: Matt Riggs
* McMaster is out, Bolton is in
* Roger tells Alex to like Bolton
* Bolton is an apparatchik
* McMaster is a leaker
* Vladimir Putin is a beloved strongman
* Alex is mad at Colbert and Thomas Middleditch
* Guest: Francis Boyle, hates Bolton, no clip
* David Hogg sucks... buy super male vitality
* Brave New World wants to make you a beta soy boy using the show Silicon Valley
* Roger: Guccifer 2.0 conversation doesn't matter
* Trump is going to veto the omnibus spending bill
* Whoops, he's going to sign it
* Alex should be upset about Saudi Arabia arms sale
* Alex is on board because Trump
* Why is David Hogg bullying Alex?
* Hogg and all the Parkland speakers are in the drama club
* Why can't CNN be civil?
* Hogg talks gay frogs on CSPAN, so Alex plugs water filters
* Atrazine background
* David Hogg? More like David Frog! Buy a water filter!
* Alex edits Middleditch clip

## Detailed Show Notes

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

### Guests

* **Dr. Francis Boyle**: Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois. He has a long-history of advocating for indigenous peoples, going so far as to condemn the US Federal Government for their treatment of Native peoples. He has advocated for Hawaiian Independence since at least 1993. These are all very positive things, until it gets to the point where he argues that the Federal Government is operating out of a "grotesque vision of a New World Order," which goes a long ways to explain why a guy who supports oppressed populations would appear on InfoWars.

### Narratives

On Thursday night, it was announced that Trump was replacing Gen. McMaster with John Bolton as his Homeland Security Adviser. This should be antithetical to literally everything that Alex stands for.

As an official in George W. Bush's state department, Bolton was instrumental in justifying the beginning of the Iraq War, pushing false intelligence to help make the case for regime change. His position was that there weren't enough countries on the "Axis Of Evil," and that we should aim to take out even more leaders.

Since then, Bolton has been very active pushing for a war with Iran, going so far as to tell an Iranian exile group (who is very unpopular in Iran) that there would be regime change in Iran by the end of 2018. He told them that eight months ago. He is the literal definition of a war-monger, and as Alex tries to pretend that he is against "nation building" and is for everyone having "national sovereignty," Alex should be very, very against Bolton being anywhere near power.

But, because Alex is an idiot, he believes that John Bolton is just going to come in and be a strong force to push "Trump's agenda." His only reason for believing this, of course, is that Roger Stone told him so. This should be an indication that Alex is past the point of no return; if he can accept the idea of John Bolton being in the administration, there is nothing that can shake him.

To give the appearance of "looking at both sides," Alex has Dr. Francis Boyle on to say some negative stuff about Bolton. Alex doesn't engage about any of it, doubles-down on his position that Roger has fed him, and tries to steer the interview into being about something he and Boyle agree on, namely that Hillary Clinton sucks. It's a sad attempt at looking like he's covering the issues from all sides.

During the broadcast, Trump holds a press conference where he discusses and signs the Omnibus Spending Bill. Before he signs the bill, Alex is absolutely convinced that he is going to veto it, to the point where Alex interrupts the video multiple times to say stuff like "HE'S GONNA SHUT IT DOWN!"

As soon as Trump signs the bill, Alex immediately starts equivocating, explaining that Trump has to keep the government going. It's a very sad turnaround to witness, especially after Alex plays the audio on the show of Trump explaining that an important consideration for signing the bill is to allow arms sales to Saudi Arabia to proceed. Again, that is arms sales to Saudi Arabia, something that Alex likes to pretend he's against.

Later, Alex spends more of the show than he needs to to complain that Parkland survivor David Hogg is bullying him. It's your run-of-the-mill Alex self-victimization narrative, where he misinterprets complaints that people are making about him and just responds to the fake version as opposed to the real one.

Alex takes particular issue with the fact that David Hogg made fun of Alex's "gay frogs" comments in a C-SPAN appearance, because Alex believes that science backs up his claims. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Alex keeps flashing up one article, a "Berkeley study," that he seems to think is enough to justify his claims that things in the water are turning frogs gay and that it will do the same to humans. The problem, as is so often the case, is that Alex did not do enough reading.

What that article claims is that the chemical atrazine appears to be capable of inducing a change of sex in frogs that are exposed to elevated levels of it in their environment, but the issue with that is that some fish and amphibians are able to spontaneously change sex, and the prevailing thought is that atrazine may trigger this mechanism, which does not exist in humans.

There is no implication for people, and studies that have shown affects on humans (such as aggravating cancers, for instance) have been redacted by the people who ran the studies over concerns that they did not properly carry the study out.

Studies that have not been retracted have shown "there was no consistent evidence of an association between atrazine use and any cancer site." Or, others that have not been retracted have concluded "atrazine levels were not associated with ovarian cancer risk."

The way people are exposed to atrazine is almost exclusively as farmers who use it as an herbicide. Studies have shown an increase in premature births with farmers who use atrazine, but the results were deemed inconclusive because the farmers were exposed to many different chemicals, and the study could not pinpoint which might associated with the premature deliveries.

The only other ways that people get exposed are through some seepage into the ground water in communities very near farms that use atrazine, but studies have not shown this to be a very serious risk to human health.

One of the main reasons for why there are affects on frogs, but not on humans (beyond the very obvious and substantive biological differences), is that frogs live in water and breath water through gills. They are completely immersed in the water, and thus, if the water has a particular chemical in it, they are obviously going to be more affected by it.

All this is to say that David Hogg is absolutely right to mock Alex Jones for his stupidity, and Alex is such a soft boy for getting on his radio show to complain that a high schooler is "bullying him."

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