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.
Comment on Was Alex Jones right about anything?
TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
He was kinda sorta in a way right about the frogs turning gay
HopeOfTheGunblade@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 15 hours ago
I was thinking this too.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
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?
Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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. 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.
EpeeGnome@feddit.online 13 hours ago
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.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
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?
EpeeGnome@feddit.online 12 hours ago
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.