January 7, 2009

in ,

Guests:

  • Eric Plumley: Plumley is a lawyer who has experience in litigating surveillance-related cases. Alex seems to intend to have him on to talk about the legality or illegality of the government monitoring people, but Plumley's specialty seems to be in cases of a spouse spying on their partner in order to dig up incriminating information about them. The interview is interesting, but it is clear that it is a much smaller focus than what Alex intended.
  • Ray McGovern: McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and was involved in creating Presidential Daily Briefings, particularly in the Reagan White House. Since then, he's been an activist, voicing strong opinions against torture and the Iraq War. McGovern seems like a complicated figure. On the one hand, he has legitimate career credentials and has a track record against horrible things (like torture). On the other hand, he also has a history of going on Russian and Turkish media to support Russian talking points. He also has written for Russia Insider since 2015, including such articles as "How The West Provoked The New Cold War," and "Swamp Psychopath (John) Brennan Running Scared." Not as damning as the writings of Paul Craig Roberts, but still showing a very specific bias.

Narratives:

Alex Jones spends a very large portion of this show complaining about a cop who recently shot and killed an unarmed man named Oscar Grant, in Oakland, CA. Grant may have gotten into a fight on a BART train at around 2 AM on New Years Day, 2009. Cops responded to the scene, where witnesses confirmed that Grant was "peaceful" when the officers arrived and that the officers were the aggressors. They ended up having Grant on his stomach on the ground, trying to handcuff him, when officer Johannes Mehserle shot him in the back, which led to his death hours later at a hospital.

This is a horrible story that we've seen play out so many times, but what sticks out in this case is that Alex Jones' take on the entire thing is 100% against the police. At this point in his career, he hadn't made the pivot toward pandering to military and police yet, so his perspective is entirely about how this is a horrifying example of police brutality. Most likely, he's just against the police because, at this point, he views them as extensions of President Obama, but whatever the case is, it is a tremendous difference from where he will end up being a few years later.

The rest of most of the show is spent with Alex talking about the Trans-Texas Corridor, the super highway that Alex is convinced is a Globalist takeover of the Americas, and will lead to the North American Union. None of these things came to pass, and the Trans-Texas Corridor did not end up getting built.

His topic on the TTC today is that "they" are saying that the plans for the road fell through, but in reality, "they" were just changing the name. This is inaccurate. The TTC never got made, and the North American Union remains a non-existent entity that really has no political traction and no one is really pushing for.