Alex Jones is one of those gadfly media personalities that gets lumped in with regular conservative media, partial to smear said media (“Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, they’re all lunatics!”) and partially because sometimes Jones exposes some of the same holes in The Narrative that sane people do (Flu Manchu vaccines come to mind). He’s more of a loony libertarian fringe figure than a traditional conservative.
Jones gets lots of things wrong, and many of his ideas are crazy, as indicated by the whole Sandy Hook trial. No one should mistake his views for mainstream conservative thought. That said, I think it is a grave mistake to push Jones off social media like YouTube and Twitter. Let him be wrong, and let people point out he’s wrong.
Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover is a car YouTuber (“Welcome to Hoovie’s Garage, the dumbest automotive channel in all YouTube!”) who buys, drives, and pays to have repaired various interesting cars, some of which he later resells. I think he popped up in my YouTube feed because I watch a lot of Top Gear/Grand Tour videos.
Today’s lesson in why you can’t trust Alex Jones comes from the intersection of these two.
Act I: Hoovie goes in with a friend to buy 50% of an all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck. Overall he seems pretty pleased with the truck, which has plenty of acceleration. Video linked rather than embedded, as most of it is peripheral to the discussion.
Act II: Hoovie tries to use the Lightning to tow an old Ford Model-A truck on a lightweight aluminum trailer, and find outs that the range while towing is absolutely horrible. “I used 90 miles of range in 30 miles!”
I wouldn’t ding a car manufacturer for towing eating up that much range in, say, a Tesla car or a Prius. But towing a trailer is one of the primary use cases for a big pickup like the Ford F-150. Moreover, it’s a use case that other large gas or diesel powered pickup trucks handle pretty well.
Act III: Alex Jones finds Hoovie’s video on the Lightning and then proceeds to Alex Jones all over it:
It’s a pretty bad look when you’re commenting on the video in real time and just making shit up that isn’t there. Hoovie didn’t say it couldn’t get above 25 miles an hour, or that it lacked torque, he said it had range problems when towing.
There are real concerns about the ability of electric vehicles to replace gasoline-powered transportation, especially under the pressure of irrational green mandates. But if Alex Jones was rational, he wouldn’t have to make up crazy shit that people didn’t say to make his point.
Tags: Alex Jones, Ford, Green New Deal, Media Watch, Pickup Truck, Regulation, Tyler "Hoovie" Hoover, video
Yep. Alex Jones is a grifter, recycling fear and outrage…
No different than BLMNSBC…selling to the clueless
Alex Jones has been saying crazy stuff for years, nothing has changed. Sadly he does get painted as a “conservative” by those individuals who think Joe Biden is mentally sharp!
sometimes Jones exposes some of the same holes in The Narrative that Jones does
Was that second “Jones” supposed to be someone else?
[Fixed. – LP]
The Sandy Hook trial?
The one in Austin, where because he failed to produce video analytics he claims he never had (and, if important to the proceedings, could be subpoenaed from Google,) the judge declared him in breach of discovery and called the case in the plaintiffs’ favor without bothering to get the jury involved until the question of “How much?”
The one in Delaware was better… but mostly because there the judge actually let the jury decide the case, even if it was still kind of a circus because they regularly had to march the jury out of the court since the plaintiffs’ lawyer kept trying to bait Jones into contempt.
Jones may be an unscrupulous jerk; I’ve never followed the man. But it’s hard to look at those trials and see them as any sort of justice.
[…] Jones ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families. As I noted last week, Alex Jones is an unreliable loon, but that judgment seems excessive and punitive merely for […]
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