someone below had it before me
No
Most conspiracy theories get very close to the truth until they make a hard right turn into “I made it the fuck up” village.
Frogs are fabulous around me.
He probably got his name right.
Almost, probably a bit too complicated: Alexander Emerick Jones, source Wikipedia
Fun that you ask!
There is a very well done coverage on one of his topics regarding “Gay frogs” made by OkiWiredStories
Link to the short documentary:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i5uSbp0YDhc
Also an interview with the scientist from the documentary
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eUpRIyHp_Po
It was a long time since I saw it but in short:
Alex jones claimed there was chemicals in the water that altered and affected humans to be more gay/lesbian, it even turned the frogs gay.
Turns out there was man working for a pesticide company resesrching the effect it had on amphibius animals, one thing was the gender of frogs.
He found it had negative effect but the compandy would try to stop him when he found this, the docunentary shows how sygenta tried to stop him and the way corruption works on local and higher corporate levels.
I recomend watching as it is so well and gives you a insigt in the way corruption and corporate leverage works.
So i bet Alex Jones was onto somethign here, but in the end Alex Jones are paid by shady companies.
Endocrine disruptors are an important topic in environmental biology. They certainly have effects on wildlife, but Jones clearly didn’t understand it very well. There’s a pretty good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
He said he was “kind of retarded” once, so partially true.
He was kinda sorta in a way right about the frogs turning gay
Yeah, but he turned a real problem of hormone mimicking chemicals in the food chain into a meme. Honestly would have been better if he missed that one.
I was thinking this too.
Wasn’t his thing with the frogs turning gay that the government was putting something in the water turning frogs and people gay? Maybe I don’t have a complete understanding of his hypothesis but how was he right about this?
Yeah, it wasn’t secret government chemicals like he thought, but regular old pollutants. I can’t recall if it was medication from insufficiently treated sewage, or industrial runoff, or what, but there really was a case of stray chemicals making some wild frogs gay. So he was a little bit right about gay frogs. He just was, as usual, astoundingly wrong about those chemicals being a secret government plot to turn people gay.
Ok that makes sense. Still it sounds like he was regurgitating the findings of a study of frog behavior in polluted environments, and then creating a conspiracy theory around it. How was anything he added correct information on top of the preexisting evidence?
No, nothing he added was correct, he just technically wasn’t 100% wrong in what he said on the topic. This is only notable in that he usually is 100% wrong.
The real thing was that at one point there was so much plastic pollution in certain parts of the environment that some of the endocrine disrupting chemicals in it, like BPA (which mimics estrogen) and certain pthalates, were leaching into to water in large enough concentrations to make noticeable changes in the bodies and sex organs of animals that are extra sensitive to those things, like frogs and other amphibians. Mutations in male frogs where they displayed female traits, etc. It’s a big part of the reason that 15 or 20 years ago everyone started switching to metal water bottles, and the plastic ones all advertise that they’re BPA-free now. Alex Jones took that and spun it up into some grand conspiracy about the government intentionally putting chemicals in your water to feminize you and make you docile so, I dunno, you won’t put up a fight when they come to round you up and put you in FEMA camps or whatever, I guess. At least that’s the basic gist as I remember it. I never really paid an enormous amount of attention to Jones, so I might not be 100% on the details.
There was one episode of Knowledge Fight where they hilighted one single prediction that was 100% accurate, but it was all in a sea of his usual BS that is way off. I don’t remember what it was, though.
People will sit through 10 minutes of ads between 30 seconds of screaming. I didn’t think they would but 🤷
Well, I mean, 9/11 was an inside job…
His infamous statement “chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay” may have been a corruption of the discovery that sewage runoff was feminizing fish because of the estradiol in urine from women on birth control, and other endocrine disrupting chemicals newly found in rivers from human sources.
And this almost certainly affects people as well, just that the studies to prove it would also double as a textbook of ethical failures.
Also, Atrazine (a pesticide that contaminates water sources) turns the friggin frogs trans.
Damn near anything makes the frogs trans, that was the whole plot of the first Jurassic Park. They used frog DNA to fill in the missing bits, and accidentally added the voluntary sex change gene, allowing the dinos to propagate.
That’s…actually wrong for once.
The entire plot of the first Jurassic Park was caused by (a) corporate espionage and (b) lack of information about frog biology. (a) directly led to the security systems being sabotaged, and (b) led directly to dinosaurs reproducing into a population the system was not designed for.
Unless you think capitalism is the reason people don’t plan for events that cannot be reasonably expected to occur given the information at the time. Note that the paleontologist did not immediately flag the issue either during the intro presentation, so it was obscure enough that even the external experts (not the capitalists) wouldn’t have considered it. In universe.
They only hired one IT guy.
Yeah, I’ve had some friends in aquaculture and it’s a huge deal and has been for a long time. The bleaching of paper causes it too. He just went on a rant and said it all wrong.
The frogs are all gay now.
In the same way a lot of bullshitters are. He’d say 105 things a week, many of them being mutually exclusive, and then when one of the random guesses happened to have turned out to be true, he’d crow and preen to say he was right and play a clip editing out the parts where he’d said all the other nonsense.
