January 8, 2009

Guests:

• Steve Quayle: Steve Quayle is an unhinged lunatic, and someone who Alex Jones looks to as a very seriously credible source. He has written books about how there used to be literal giants walking the Earth, how the Nazis didn't lose WWII and actually have a base under Antarctica, how most natural disasters are really weather weapons, among many other insane topics. Alex made clear on another episode that Steve is the source for most of his "chimera narratives," which is really sad.
• Paul Craig Roberts: Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan in 1981, and after that became an editor for the Wall Street Journal and a Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute. Since at least 2014, he's been a columnist for Russian Insider and Russian state-owned outlet Sputnik, writing articles with titles like "America Has No Unifying Moral Culture-It Will Lose A War Against Russia," "Will Putin Realize That Russia Holds All The Cards?" and "Privatization Is The Atlanticist Strategy To Attack Russia."
• David Icke: Where to begin? David Icke was a sports broadcaster in the UK, until he went on Terry Wogan's talk show in 1991 and declared that he is the son of God. From there, he went on to be laughed at for a while, but he came out the other side of it with a pretty respectable career giving lectures about the "Reptilian bloodlines" that control the world and have for generations. He believes the Protocols of Zion are real (they are not), and he has signed off on almost every conspiracy theory out there. Also, since this appearance, he's had a falling out with Alex Jones and believes him to be a disinformation agent.

Narratives:

Alex Jones makes a very damning statement on today's show that reveals that his affinity for Russia dates back even to 2009.

On January 7, 2009 (the day prior to this episode), Russia cut off the oil that was transported through Ukraine, en route to many other countries in Europe, leaving 17 countries almost entirely without the oil that they needed to heat homes in the dead of winter. This was the end result of a breakdown in a financial deal between the two countries, and as it relates to how things ended up getting to the seriously dangerous point they reached, both Russia and Ukraine have blame to share.

However, one thing that no one in their right mind would have said in the immediate aftermath, or years later even, is what Alex Jones says on his show:

Alex does not only say that it is Ukraine's fault that oil shipments were shut down; he says that Ukraine shut off the oil. He is implying that Russia did not even have a part in the situation, that shutting down oil deliveries was not literally and entirely a decision that Russia made.

You can read an in-depth assessment of the 2009 oil dispute from the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, and you can get a sense of the underlying negligence and sloppy communication that led Europe to this brink, but what you cannot in any way justify is the idea that Ukraine shut off the oil. That is a narrative that, quite literally, only someone who willingly disseminates Russian propaganda, or someone who naively believes said propaganda and repeats it as fact, could possibly think. Suffice it to say that Alex Jones had been loving and covering for Russia long before Donald Trump came into the picture.

To drive that point home, here is a clip of Alex announcing his upcoming appearance on RT, while we watches and yells over a little snippet of Red Dawn:

In case you were wondering, the appearance he's plugging is on the day of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. Spoiler alert: On January 20th, Alex Jones leaves his own show for half an hour to do an interview on RT about how bad Obama is. His priorities should be pretty clear from that: on what should be one of the biggest days of his own career, Alex leaves his own post to appear on a hostile foreign power's state-owned media network. All about a week and a half after he said that Ukraine shut off the oil to Europe, and then moved on, never covering the story again. This does not seem coincidental.

Anyway, most of the rest of the show involves Alex further covering the San Francisco police shooting he covered on yesterday's show. He has now decided that the cop is a lunatic, and he's gotta go to jail for his actions, something he would never, ever say a few years after this episode.

The other most notable thing about this episode is the fundraising aspects of the show. He does one thing that is hilarious, and one thing that borders on illegal (but he does all the time), while trying to raise funds on this episode.

The hilarious thing is that he is trying to sell a broken bullhorn that he used to yell into, and he's reporting some very serious bids coming in on it.

Alex spends a shockingly high amount of time on this episode being very defensive about the idea that he's selling a broken bullhorn, as if his audience would not understand the idea of "memorabilia" having value outside of functional use. If I recall correctly, he's getting bids in the range of $50,000 toward the end of this episode, or at least he thinks he is.

The other fund-raising initiative that is in play today is that Alex finishes up the show with a visit from Ted Anderson, owner of the Genesis Communications Network (GCN) and owner of gold/silver sales firm Midas Resources. Ted started GCN to use as a promotional wing for Midas Resources, so it's always been about selling gold for him, but looking back at 2009, it's pretty mind-blowing to see how deeply involved Alex was in trying to push business to Midas.

Almost every day, he finishes up the show with a visit from Ted, if he doesn't talk to him in the middle of the show, often coincidentally right after he concludes an interview with one of his guests who likes to predict imminent financial collapse (see: Gerald Celente, Bob Chapman, Paul Craig Roberts, Peter Schiff, almost anyone who comes on Alex's show honestly).

It's almost like Alex understands that it is his job to get his listeners into a suggestible state by scaring them with interviews with lunatics masquerading as experts telling them that soon their dollars will be worthless, at which point he brings in Ted with the solution to all those problems: gold!

I would say that these guys are the bigoted and paranoid version of the Home Shopping Network, if the con-men on the Home Shopping Network had designs to reshape society into a white-supremacist Christian chauvinist feudal state.