Fake Quotes

Alex Jones has a very bad habit of using fake quotes to make his arguments. While this behavior definitely manifests in his spoken word, the place where it is most offensively used is in his “documentaries,” particularly Endgame and The Obama Deception

Endgame

A mere 16 seconds into his documentary, Alex has already used a quote dishonestly. You can find the full text of H.G. Wells book here, and if you go to page 111, you can see the full quote, without the words that Alex chose to omit. The words he cut out completely change the meaning of the quote.

The full quote is: “Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.”

In its proper context, this is a quote about how the ruling classes will fight to the death against any movement toward greater social equality that takes away their privileged positions and frustrates their passions. Alex is trying to present the quote as expressing that there is going to be a New World Order and people like Alex, “The Patriots,” are going to die fighting nobly against it. These are exact opposite meanings.

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This is not a real quote. No one can find any place where it is recorded that Hitler said this or wrote it. It doesn’t appear in any official transcripts or any verified sources. It is essentially rumor, and Alex provides no evidence in his bibliography for the film to defend his assertion that Hitler did say this:

That is not good enough.

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You can find the full transcript of Warburg’s address here, and if you do, you will find that Alex has changed the quote in a small but very important way.

The actual quote is: “We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.”

This is a crucial change in language. In the actual quote, James Warburg is expressing the feeling that a world government is likely an inevitability and that we had a decision as to whether that eventual state is reached by war or collaboration. Alex has changed the language so it appears to be a threat, that there will be world government whether or not you like it. Alex absolutely edited this quote on purpose.

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Kissinger is an easy target because he is a monster, but this is a fake quote. No sources exist to verify that he has ever said or written this, and Alex provides no evidence or citation for it in his bibliography:

This most likely comes from a misquoting of Kissinger by Louis Farrakhan, but there is no evidence that Kissinger ever said such a thing.

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The Obama Deception

In his follow up “documentary,” Alex Jones made two very smart changes to his process. First, he put less of the fake quotes he was using up on screen, which makes it harder for people like me to present how wrong he is visually. Second, he just didn’t even release a bibliography, so people like me can’t point out that just saying “insert source later” doesn’t count as citing a source.

But he still uses a bunch of fake quotes.

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and it conspires against it in times of adversity. It’s more despotic than monarchy. It’s more insolent than autocracy. It’s more selfish than bureaucracy. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. -Abraham Lincoln

Around the 10:30 mark of the film, Gerald Celente reads this quote, and says that he believes that Lincoln was assassinated because he said these words. The problem is that Lincoln never said those words, so it seems unlikely that it was the reason he was assassinated.

On it’s face, this quote is absurd. Before entering politics, Lincoln was a corporate attorney, representing large interests like the Illinois Central Railroad. He was not anti-corporations in any sense of the term. This quote is from a fraudulent letter that was included in the 1950 “Lincoln Encyclopedia,” thanks to some sloppy editing. By the time Alex made this film, it was very public information that this quote was not real.

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In Evians, France, in 1991, standing before the Bilderberg Group, the apex of the World Government power structure, David Rockefeller defined the New World Order as “a system of world government serving the international banking elite.” -Alex Jones

This comes at approximately the 17:10 point of the film. This supposed quote is absurd, for a number of reasons.

First, Alex has no citation for it, and couldn’t possibly have one since it supposedly was said at a secret meeting. His assumed source on this is his “Bilderberg expert” Daniel Estulin, who is not a credible source.

Second, there’s no reason why David Rockefeller would ever say this, even in the privacy of a secret meeting. If Bilderberg is evil and all that, then everyone there would already know what the definition of the New World Order was; they are a part of it. Is Alex trying to pretend that this quote was taken from Rockefeller giving a speech at a Bilderberg Freshman Initiation meeting? It’s just nonsense.

Third, the Bilderberg meeting wasn’t in Evians in 1991. They were in Baden-Baden, Germany that year and in Evians in 1992, which really seems like someone who has all the secret information about their internal workings should know.

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This is a fake quote that did not appear anywhere in print until 1948, though Jefferson died in 1826.

The part where Jefferson says "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies" is close to a real quote, but not quite. It also wasn’t in a letter to Albert Gallatin from 1802, it was from a letter to John Taylor from 1816. The reason people like to claim this quote is from 1802 is that Jefferson was President in 1802, but hadn’t been in office for seven years at the time he actually wrote that letter to Taylor.

Further, the point that Jefferson is supposed to be making here is not one he could have. Etymologists have traced the use of the word “deflation” as describing a monetary process, and found that the word did not have that meaning until 1920, almost 100 years after Jefferson died.

Jefferson was not a fan of paper money, but using this quote to make that argument is super dishonest, particularly because it adds in all the stuff about “children waking up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered,” which exists only to appeal to nativist fears of losing social standing. Beyond that, using this fake quote is also super lazy.

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This is by no means a complete list of the fake quotes that Alex Jones passes off as real, but I feel like these examples should demonstrate a very important trend, and that is that, best case scenario, Alex Jones has no idea what he’s talking about. The best possibility is that he is just super lazy and an unprincipled ideologue who wants to make his side’s argument as easily as possible so he never fact checks anything because that takes too much time.

Worst case (and more likely) scenario, Alex Jones knows exactly what he’s doing, and knows he’s misleading his audience with fake quotes and completely made up stories because doing so pays better.

"Mandatory Service Bill"

In March 2009, Alex Jones was doing a lot of work to paint newly-inaugurated President Obama’s focus on service as a nefarious plot to enslave the country. He used a lot of fake and misrepresented stories to make his argument, but perhaps the most embarrassing in hindsight is how he covered the “Mandatory Service Bill.”

There’s a chance that Alex just knew that he needed a big story to help promote The Obama Deception, or maybe Ted Anderson’s gold sales were dipping and he needed some serious fear to right the ship, and that’s what led him to do what he did. Whatever the case, on March 20, 2009, Alex began telling his audience that a bill had passed the House that reinstated the draft, which would lead to their children being conscripted into military service.

In order to make his lie seem more legitimate, he weaved in the completely unrelated Department of Defense Directive 1404.10, but this lie was centered around HR 1388, also known as the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, or the GIVE Act for short.

Alex was correct in reporting that HR 1388 had passed the House, as it passed on March 18th by a majority of 321-105. When it made its way to the Senate, Sen. Orrin Hatch called it “probably the most bipartisan bill we will see on the Senate floor this year.”

Why is a bill that would create a new military draft being described as something that is super “bipartisan?” Is Hatch saying that both parties are coming out as wanting to screw you and your family over?

Orrin Hatch sucks, but that was not what he was saying, because Alex is lying about this bill creating a draft. As it relates to HR 1388, Alex Jones’ propaganda relies on one misunderstanding and one lie.

The Misunderstanding

On March 9, 2009, the original form of this bill was introduced on the House floor. It included the following language:

“The purpose of the Commission is to gather and analyze information in order to make recommendations to Congress to:

(Ed. Note: #1-5 are omitted as they are irrelevant to Alex’s point)

(6) Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. ”

This “Commission” that is referenced is just a new name for the already existing National Advisory Council on the Public Service that was instituted in the Public Service Act of 1990, signed into law by George H.W. Bush. HR 1388 was really just an updating and augmenting of that law from 1990, so most of what it contained had already been on the books for almost 20 years.

In the passage above, Alex hinges on the word “mandatory” and uses that as his entire argument. Whenever he talks about the bill, he never mentions that the context of the passage he’s selectively quoting heavily implies that the Commission could take a look at the situation a determine that, no, a “workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement” cannot be implemented. That outcome is entirely possible, given the language of the bill.

Nothing in here creates a draft, nothing in the bill even establishes mandatory service. It says that the Congressional Commission on Civic Service should look into whether mandatory service requirements for youths were something that could be done, and if it would even be helpful.

Ultimately, this subtle distinction doesn’t matter because of this next part.

The Lie

Alex is operating on old information and pretending it is current.

The version of the bill that was introduced in the House on March 9, 2009 included the language excepted above. The problem is that this is not the version of the bill that passed the House, nor is it the version that was ever discussed in the Senate.

Every version of the bill past March 16, 2009 has that language taken out of it, and it is nowhere to be found in the form of the bill that passed the House on March 18th.

Alex begins the narrative that a bill “creating a draft has passed the House” on March 20, 2009, two days after the amended version of HR 1388 passed, which he has every opportunity to know is not the truth.

The only two possible explanations for this are: 1) he’s lying about the bill in order to stir up fear in his audience, or 2) he’s so bad at his job that he didn’t confirm that the version of the bill that passed was the same as the version that was introduced before misinforming his audience about it repeatedly.

Department of Defense Directive 1404.10

In early 2009, Alex Jones was desperately trying to misrepresent things to convince his audience that newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama was working swiftly to force the general public into shock troops to implement his tyranny. Years later, it is clear that Obama was not doing this, and in effect, this was an entirely fraudulent perception that Alex himself was working hard to create.

One of the pieces of his evidence is the DoD Directive 1404.10. Here is a clip from his March 20, 2009 show where he discusses the directive:

According to Alex, this directive says that “management retains the authority to direct and assign civilian employees, either voluntarily, involuntarily, or on an unexpected basis to accomplish the DoD mission.” This is fair enough. The report does technically contain those words, but Alex is depriving them of any context to make them mean something completely different than they do.

Alex uses this, along with lies about House Resolution 1388 (or as Alex calls it, “the Mandatory Service Bill”) to create the perception that, any day now, Obama is going to force you or your children into servitude for the federal government. Nothing in any of his supposed proof says anything even close to such a thing.

The first problem with Alex’s take on the DoD directive is that he doesn’t acknowledge that this is talking about “civilian employees” of the Department of Defense. The word “civilian” is included because many of the people employed by the DoD are employed in enlisted positions, and there are different rules for the different classifications of employees. This is clearly indicated in the Glossary section on page 19 of the report:

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This is not saying that the Department of Defense is giving itself the authority to conscript any citizen of the USA to engage in whatever missions they want them to go on, it is just saying that people in management positions have the authority to reassign DoD employees to fit the needs of the DoD.

The section just before the part Alex quotes reads:

“DoD civilian employees in E-E or NCE positions may be directed to accept deployment requirements of the position. However, whenever possible, the DoD Civilian Expeditionary Workforce will be asked to serve expeditionary requirements voluntarily. ”

E-E means “Emergency Essential” and NCE means “Non-Combat Essential” (which is to say a position that is essential, but does not involve combat). This entire section is about how, as it relates to essential positions within the Department of Defense, the management reserves the right to reorganize their staff as necessary, and will try their best to make sure everyone is in a position they want to be in. That’s pretty much all it’s saying.

It is true that the Civilian Expeditionary Workforce, or CEW, does accept volunteers, but these volunteers are under no expectation to accept a “mission” that they do not feel comfortable with. From their own FAQ page, in response to the question, “As a volunteer, are there any negative consequences if I must decline an opportunity?”: “As an employee volunteer, you cannot be directed to serve an expeditionary requirement.”

There is extensive training and rigid requirements that go into people being deemed eligible for one of these positions, and they are pretty high paying, so the very idea that this is some kind of program where the government is going to encroach on citizen’s rights and force them to enlist is ludicrous.

The thing that adds extra dishonesty to this story Alex is telling is that he and his crew are pretending that this is a new thing that Obama is announcing.

Steve Watson’s article about the directive starts: “The Defense Department has established a "civilian expeditionary workforce" that will see American civilians trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of worldwide military missions.”

Problem is, DoD Directive 1404.10 is really just an updating of an already existing directive. Here is the version from 1992, which still explicitly includes nearly identical language about deployment of civilian employees of the Department of Defense. Also, this was from April 1992, so it’s not like Alex can just yell “Bill Clinton” and pretend he still has a point.

Also, here is a Department of Defense revision to their manual regarding employees, in this case, civilian employees serving overseas. It is from 1988.

Ultimately, this story serves as yet another time that Alex Jones and his team have taken something out of context to completely lie about what it means. This time, it is absolutely knowingly pretending they have no idea what “civilian” means when it’s being used in a Department of Defense document.

On the scale of Intentional Misrepresentations, we rate this one "Pathetic.”

And Now For A World Government

“And Now For A World Government” is the name of an article published in the Financial Times on December 8, 2008. Alex Jones believes it to be an open declaration of the existence of a world government, but as is so often the case, he is just making stuff up.

Part of the problem is that the name of the article does suggest that the body of the text will involve its author, Gideon Rachman, proceeding to announce world government. “And now for…” has the ring of a host introducing the next act at a variety show, so I do understand how you could get that impression from the title. But you could only get that impression if you only read the title.

The Body Of The Article

When you begin reading the article, it should immediately jump out that the author is writing in the first person about his own subjective perceptions. That is what the article is about; about his personal opinion that he sees signs that a world government may be a plausible idea for the first time in history. Not that it is happening, not that it’s been announced, nothing of the sort.

Mr. Rachman goes on to explain why he feels this way:

1. The problems facing most countries these days are global in nature, as opposed to primarily domestic concerns. Terrorism, climate change, and economic fluctuations are all things that do not have any respect for borders.

2. Global collaboration is much more possible now, because of the advances the world has seen in technology, particularly in terms of communication and transportation. The entire world is accessible to everyone in a way it was not for previous generations.

3. Those problems that were mentioned in Point #1? The only way any country is going to navigate any of those issues successfully is the world working together. International problems are generally not resolvable by local action alone.

The author goes on to discuss how there are indications that newly-elected President Obama is interested in international cooperation, and then brings up some proposals from the Managing Global Instability project (linked to John Podesta) regarding counter-terrorism initiatives, climate change programs, and UN peacekeeping efforts. All of this is to suggest that the trend appears to be leaning toward the world working together.

But in terms of it leading to an actual world government? The conclusion that he comes to is that it doesn’t appear that the idea is all that popular, so it probably won’t happen, and if it does, it won’t be anytime soon.

This article literally says none of the things Alex Jones claims it does, it just has a salacious title that Alex uses to build propaganda off of.

The Article’s Author

If Alex did any looking into Mr. Rachman, he would know that he is not some “Globalist” one-world government promoter. In 2001, he very publicly argued that the UK should not adopt the Euro as a currency, for just one example of him doing exactly the opposite of what Alex would say a “Globalist” would do.

All that doesn’t prove that Mr. Rachman is as much of a nationalist as Alex might like him to be, and even if he was, he’s British, but this should demonstrate that the author of this piece is not someone trying to use sneaky language to subtly announce the new Global Government, as Alex contends.

H.G. Wells, "New World Order"

Most people know H.G. Wells primarily as one of the early luminaries of the sci-fi world, as the mind behind The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Though that alone would represent a career that any author would feel pretty good about, H.G. Wells wrote so much more than the “famous stuff.”

From the very beginning of his career in science fiction, and actually predating it by a few years, Wells had a very diversified writing portfolio. Two years before The Time Machine was published, Wells put out a text book teaching Biology. In 1913, he published Little Wars, a book that served to lay out rules for children to use when playing with toy soldiers, predating the first publication of Dungeons and Dragons by 61 years (Gary Gygax even said in a forward he wrote for the 2004 reprint that, “Little Wars influenced my development of both the Chainmail miniatures rules and the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game”).

Honestly, looking back on his career, it would be difficult to say what was his primary occupation, and what constituted extra-curricular activities. He is most famous for the science fiction work, but all along the way, he was writing philosophy, as well as political tracts in defense of socialism. That last part is where Alex Jones’ ears perk up.

Alex’s formative political mentors were pretty much all John Birch Society anti-communist propagandists, so from a very early age, he has believed that Communism only exists as a way for a government to assert Authoritarian control over a population, and Socialism doesn’t even really exist, it is just the appealing public face that is used to sell a population Communism, which is really secretly just Authoritarianism. He leaves no room for nuance, and as such, any time anyone is advocating for Socialism, Alex believes them to be at best a useful idiot, and at worst a committed salesman for the “Globalists” who are trying to enslave the population.

This is a very effective life-hack, in as much as it frees you up to never really discuss the ideas or the arguments that someone is putting forward, and allows you to immediately disqualify any ideas that fit into one box you don’t want to open.

Since at least 1907, Wells published non-fiction books where he would discuss the merits of Socialism, and the increasingly obvious downsides of Capitalism run amok. A quick glance through his bibliography makes it plain as day that he was a committed Socialist from the jump:

• Will Socialism Destroy The Home? (1907) [Note: the conclusion is that it will not]

• New Worlds For Old (1908) [Note: in this book, Wells even makes the important distinction that Socialism is not, in his conception, a political movement at all. It is instead a moral and intellectual process that the individual undertakes. He says, “only secondarily and incidentally does it sway the world of politics. It is not a political movement; it may engender political movements, but it can never become a political movement.”]

• The War and Socialism (1915)

• The Salvaging of Civilization (1921)

There are plenty of other examples with less overt titles (“The Misery Of Boots,” for example), but this should demonstrate that when Alex Jones wants to take aim at H.G. Wells for being a Socialist, he should have an overabundance of ammo. That makes it particularly disappointing that there is really only one example that Alex ever uses when attacking Wells:

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This is a “quotation” that Alex Jones uses to open his “documentary” film Endgame. And it is the very definition of deception and propaganda.

You can find the complete text of Wells’ New World Order here, and if you do follow that link and try to find the quote that Alex is using, you will very quickly see a pretty sizable problem:

“Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.”

— p. 111

The first indication that Alex Jones is using deception here is that he does not admit in his use of the quote that he has cut out parts of it, which is supposed to be done with an ellipsis. This is a very basic matter of editorial ethics, and to not follow that convention is to change the words you are quoting and hope your viewers don’t notice.

He is absolutely doing this intentionally. Alex’s use of the quote is in service of reinforcing his argument that the “Globalists” want to bring in a New World Order that will rule over/kill all of the peasants and lower/middle class, like you and me. He is using this “quote” to imply that Wells is saying that people like you and me are going to be unhappy with the New World Order, and we will end up dying fighting against it, but the “Globalists” don’t care, that’s just the way it has to go.

In reality, H.G. Wells is actually making the opposite point.

Maharajas are kings, a Millionaire in 1940 would have 17 million dollars today.

Pukka Sahib is a colonialist term that the British made the colonized Burmese people call them to indicate that the colonized thought that their colonizer was honest, decent, incorruptible in their deeds, and a “pure white gentleman.”

“Pretty ladies” is meant to mean very rich women, but unfortunately does still rely a little on the entrenched sexism of the day. Wells’ implication here is that the rich ladies, although they may be pretty, are still complicit in the acts of the Maharajas, Millionaires, and Pukka Sahibs, and would similarly be scared of the coming New World Order and would likely die fighting against it, to maintain their social standing.

But, there is a very important distinction to make here: H.G. Wells is emphatically not talking about a political revolution, or even something that will happen in any sort of actual revolt:

“There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will be not this man nor that man nor any man but Man, that being who is in some measure in every one of us. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.”

— p. 105

The Socialism that H.G. Wells advocates for is an internalized enlightenment of sorts, not a storming of the castles. When he says that these Maharajas and Millionaires will die fighting against it, it is not because this Socialist New World Order will kill them, and Wells makes very clear why he believes that will be the case.

It is because he believes that what motivates the people in power to maintain the exploitative system as it exists is their fundamental desire to feel “glory over his fellows,” to be seen as better than others, an impulse that leads to “avarice, hoarding, and endless ungainful cheating and treachery.”

It is a part of the unchecked ego that we all possess to varying degrees, and Wells feels that, in a just society, we all make a compromise to control that impulse to crush others in exchange for others also agreeing not to crush us:

“Law is essentially an adjustment of that craving to glory over other living things, to the needs of social life, and it is more necessary in a collectivist society than in any other. It is a bargain, it is a social contract, to do as we would be done by and to repress our extravagant egotisms in return for reciprocal concessions. And in the face of these considerations we have advanced about the true nature of the beast we have to deal with, it is plain that the politics of the sane man as we have reasoned them out, must anticipate a strenuous opposition to this primary vital implement for bringing about the new world order.”

— p. 109

The New World Order that Wells is talking about is one where individuals have chosen, of free will, to live in ways that are more conducive to collective good, recognizing that will sometimes mean making individual sacrifices. The Maharajas and Millionaires, Wells probably correctly predicts, will not want that kind of a world to form, because their entire place in the world is predicated upon them being in “a position of glory” over others, which is antithetical to making personal sacrifices for the public good.

When he says they will “die protesting against” the New World Order, Wells is not saying that anyone is going to kill them; he is expressing, again probably correctly, that these people are so invested in their own ego and social position that they would sooner die than give it up.

All of this is abundantly clear from the text, if a person actually reads it.

If Alex Jones has ever read this book, he knows fully well what this passage means, and he is intentionally lying about it, cutting out a few key words to make a sentence appear to mean the exact opposite of what it really does. It’s possible he’s never read the book, but it doesn’t matter; either way he’s a liar.

US Code, Title 50, Chapter 32, Subsection 1520a

Alex Jones is a man who believes in chemtrails. He also believes that the government has secretly granted themselves the right to wantonly experiment on human subjects, and he has one obscure piece of the US Code that he brings up very often to justify this incorrect belief.

Whenever he is pressed to justify his position, he will generally fall back on referencing the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, where rural African-American citizens were intentionally infected with syphilis so researchers could study the progression of the disease when left untreated. He feels that bringing up this example proves that the government has done similar things in the past, therefore they must currently be doing so now, which is incredibly unsound logic.

Tuskegee as a piece of American history is a deeply racist and profoundly unethical case of medical misbehavior, but it does not really help Alex’s argument that the government has secret authority to test dangerous things on unsuspecting people.

None of this should in any way minimize the damage that those doctors did to unsuspecting citizens or their families, but it needs to be brought up that the Tuskegee studies began in 1932. This fact is only relevant because the medical ethics of that time were very different than those of today. Just as a very basic example, the term “informed consent” was not even coined until 1957.

The idea that experimenters had an obligation to make their test subjects aware of the risks associated with the study they are a part of is not a view that has been uniformly held by medical practitioners over time. In fact, many have been proponents of lying to patients when the physician thinks that they will make a bad medical decision, thus saving them from their own ignorance of science.

In terms of research, the conversation about how subjects had the right to know what they were being subjected to did not really begin to take its modern shape until the Nuremberg Code was established in 1947, in response to the atrocities of Nazi human experimentation. And even after that, it would still take a long time for the standards to evolve to the point where we are today, which is still far from perfection.

In 1932, many of our modern expectations of how a researcher or doctor would treat a subject or patient were not the standard. What the Tuskegee researchers did was absolutely monstrous and wrong, but they were able to do it in part because of the horribly insufficient medical ethics standards of the day.

All that is to say that Alex Jones cannot really use the abuses of Tuskegee to insinuate or prove that the government can do those sorts of things today. There are rules, regulations, and laws on the books that were not there 85 years ago.

And one of those rules is something he likes to bring up very often when he gets into an argument with someone about chemtrails. He most likely loves bringing it up because he can rattle of “US Code Title 50 Chapter 32 Subsection 1520a” really fast and the person he’s talking to will not know what he’s talking about and just assume he has some deep knowledge of topic, when in reality he’s just memorized some words that refer to a statute that actually disproves his argument.

The basic outline of Alex’s contention is that the government has granted itself the authority to expose unwitting civilians to whatever they want, as long as it is disguised as a “study” or “research.” Thus, the government can spray dangerous whatever dangerous chemicals they want over the Heartland in the form of chemtrails, so long as they justify it as being part of a research experiment. In reality, Alex knows better; their true intentions are to pacify and sterilize the population.

His conviction that the government can get away with anything under the name of research is almost entirely based on his misreading of the aforementioned subsection in the US Code.

Chapter 32 contains a number of statutes regarding the proper handling of chemical weapons, mostly covering topics such as how best to transport any chemically dangerous material, or proper disposal methods. Of all of these, Subsection 1520a is the only one Alex is interested in because the subtitle of it is “Restrictions on use of human subjects for testing of chemical or biological agents.”

The subsection starts out:

“(a) Prohibited activities: The Secretary of Defense may not conduct (directly or by contract)—

(1) any test or experiment involving the use of a chemical agent or biological agent on a civilian population; or

(2) any other testing of a chemical agent or biological agent on human subjects”

So far, so good. What we have here is the beginnings of a good statute. The Secretary of Defense cannot test chemical or biological agents on civilians, nor can they pay someone else to.

The next section is where Alex tries to intentionally confuse his listeners, or as we call it, “lie to them:”

“(b) Exceptions: Subject to subsections (c), (d), and (e), the prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply to a test or experiment carried out for any of the following purposes:

(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.

(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.

(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control”

On first glance, you could look at this section of the statute and easily imagine how these exceptions basically would undo the entire prohibition on exposing civilians to chemical and biological agents. If any “medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity” is grounds for an exception, it would stand to reason that pretty anything could fall under that heading.

And that is what Alex Jones preaches to his audience, even going so far as to exploit Joe Rogan’s ignorance of the statute to sell his con to Rogan’s audience:

At this point in Rogan’s podcast Alex is losing an argument about chemtrails, and pulls out the subsection to wow and impress Joe Rogan and Eddie Bravo into thinking he’s an expert on the subject, and thus his position must be correct and backed up by documents they just don’t know about. He uses the subsection to make the claim that “the government gets around the law by calling something research,” which is exactly the wrong conclusion you could easily come away with, if you misread Paragraph B.

The reason for that is that Paragraph B explicitly begins, “subject to subsections (c), (d), and (e).” The exceptions that sound scary in Paragraph B are very specifically subject to these other paragraphs that must be considered in order to understand what this statute means.

Paragraph D involves a requirement to notify Congress, and Paragraph E lays out a specific definition of what is meant by the term “biological agent,” but the one that is the most important is Paragraph C, which states:

“(c) Informed consent required

The Secretary of Defense may conduct a test or experiment described in subsection (b) only if informed consent to the testing was obtained from each human subject in advance of the testing on that subject.”

Because informed consent is required for any test or experiment that falls under the heading of those exceptions in Paragraph B, this statute cannot be used to justify a belief that the government has given itself carte blanche to do chemical and biological tests on civilians with disregard for their rights.

Using this statute to explain how the government has allowed themselves to spray chemtrails is patently absurd, given that Paragraph C would require them to receive informed consent from literally every civilian who would be affected, which in the case of chemtrails would be entire cities or counties. If anything, this subsection explicitly damages Alex’s argument.

There are really only two possibilities here. One option is that Alex Jones knows that Paragraph C exists and that all of the things he says about this subsection are completely incorrect, and he chooses to lie about it anyway because he knows most people are never going to look it up, and even if they do, they’ll probably just see the scary words in Paragraph B and uncritically accept Alex’s narrative.

The other option is that Alex has never actually read the entire subsection himself and is actually so stupid that he thinks he’s right.