The term “scraping the bottom of the barrel” doesn’t quite do justice to the new crop of MAGA talk show hosts that think Alex Jones is too tame. One of them is Stew Peters. He went from being a failed rapper, to a failed bounty hunter, to now a full-time COVID conspiracy theorist. And yes, being full-blown MAGA, there’s the obligatory police report documenting domestic violence as well. Perhaps Trump will push him to run for Senate?
In the meantime, he hosts his own podcast that features a who’s who of Trumpian rejects: George Papadopoulos, Lin Wood, Michelle Malkin, Sidney Powell, and Karen Fann—the state senate president responsible for the disastrous Arizona audit. I don’t usually care what he’s doing, but this came across my feed. It’s as hilarious as it is sad. If there’s ever been an example of the cult-like cognitive dissonance of the MAGA crowd, this is it.
Some Q-nut told Stew Peters that he has been “magnetized” by being around people who have had the vaccine, claiming vaccinated people somehow “shed” vaccine components outside their bodies. (Obviously, this has been debunked.) As proof, he sent Stew a photo of various objects, like coins, stuck all over his body. Stew put him on the show immediately, and added that this is a phenomenon “that we’re seeing all over the place!”
Not that facts matter, but coins aren’t even magnetized. Vending machines all have magnets to reject fake coins (steel slugs) because real coins are minted mostly of nonmagnetic metals like copper and nickel. But if you are dumb enough to believe any of this, you aren’t reading Daily Kos, so I digress.
Anyway, the photo was more than enough proof for Stew to feature him on his show. Unfortunately for the guest, Stew asked the guy, Scott Taylor, to demonstrate for the audience. What happened next is comedy gold:
In case you can’t see it, Stew asked him to demonstrate. Scott Taylor wasn’t prepared for this, and repeatedly tried to put coins on his face, but they kept falling off. One coin managed to linger on his forehead before being dropped, but you can see the video was cut at the 58-second mark. Stew, ignoring his own eyes, closed by going on a rant of how this was absolute proof that this was real and the media was covering it up.
Twitter was not kind:
By the way, the amazing James Randi, who is no longer with us, was a magician and scientific skeptic I loved to watch growing up. He was always invited on shows to challenge paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Sure enough, he was once asked to challenge a claim that someone was “magnetic.”
Unlike Scott Taylor, this guy actually put some real effort into the illusion, as the crowd oohed and aahed. After the trick, Randi simply asked the man to rub talcum powder on his body, which in no way should interfere with magnetic properties, and try the trick again.
R.I.P. Randi. I would say we could use your skepticism with these anti-vaxxers now, but as you can see, they won’t even believe what they see with their own eyes.