Episode 422: April 17, 2020 — Knowledge Fight

Dan and Jordan discuss an episode of the Alex Jones Show that is mostly about Alex trying to make a target of a med school professor in Singapore, and rattling the sabers of war toward China.

Topics covered include:

Owen Shroyer’s recent suspension from Twitter for promoting a rally against social distancing
Alex’s new theory that Facebook’s science fact-checking is being run by one of the top scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is based on a misrepresentation about Dr. Danielle Anderson, who contributes to an entity called Health Feedback, which is a part of Science Feedback, a group that is subcontracted by Facebook to assist with fact-checking. She teaches at Duke-NUS in Singapore, and has worked occasionally with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past
Alex claims that Hillary Clinton views 1984 as a how-to-manual. This is based on a blog post about an excerpt from her 2017 book, and he’s just quoting the headline of that blog
The co-discoverer of HIV has made comments that Alex is citing as support for his positions. A lot of this is based on the retracted Indian paper about Covid-19, which has been discredited, particularly by a Feb. 2020 article in Emerging Microbes and Infections
Alex’s belief that Facebook is run by 10,000 Stasi members is based on a misrepresentation of a German task force on online hate speech, which included an NGO headed by Anette Kahane, who was an unofficial informant for the Stasi for a few years when in college
The CDC is not covering up the flu season, they’ve just ended updating their burden estimates for the season.
Alex is being sued by his ex-wife for a lot of money, in a case that is set for trial on April 23
Alex’s water filters are shipped by My Patriot Supply
Johns Hopkins keeps a list of all the Covid-19 tests, one of which was developed at Duke-NUS, and Dr. Anderson did assist with it. This test they created was designed to detect very specific antibodies, because they were developing it in a country that had been hit hard by SARS.

Also, Alex and Owen Shroyer engage in some wacky comedy bits, including Owen wearing a baby mask and pretending to kill Alex.