March 18, 2018

Guests: 

• Lee Stranahan: Lee is a journalist who is being sued along with Alex Jones. Lee Stranahan used to write for Brietbart, but quit in protest, and began working for Sputnik, which is a state-owned Russian media outlet. When asked about the situation, he said: “I’m on the Russian payroll now. When you work at Sputnik you’re being paid by the Russians." After the Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, Lee Stranahan went on InfoWars and other outlets to claim a connection between the rally and George Soros, arguing that this was a repeat of what "the Globalists" did in Ukraine (mirroring the Russian government's position that they were the "good guys" in Ukraine). The interview on today's show is pretty boring, and mostly just serves to further Alex's dishonest take on the new lawsuit filed against him (which he claims is being brought against him by the Pope and Georgetown University).

Narratives:

Alex is still promoting the idea that he has "high level sources" that tell him that since Andrew McCabe got fired, that indicates that indictments of James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the crew are coming any time now. Alex is a pretty smart guy; he knows that as the reality of Trump's situation gets worse, he needs to escalate how severe the imaginary issues are that he thinks are coming for "the Globalists." That's kind of how the game has to be played. Drastic circumstances demand drastic distractions.

The other main narrative of the show is that Alex desperately needs to downplay the information that is starting to come out about Cambridge Analytica and their activities during the election. Whereas Christopher Wylie has come out publicly to discuss his role in the creation of the data operations at CA and how they illegally used data they had from Facebook to micro-target political messages to people based on psychological profiles they had constructed, Alex has not read anything about this and just falls back on his standard line of "but Facebook is really the bad guy." Although he's wrong in dismissing the stuff about CA, he's not totally off-base that Facebook is 100% a bad, or at very least, negligent, actor in this situation.

Alex's response to the article about Wylie is simultaneously predictable and surprising.

On the one hand, attacking Wylie's appearance is definitely in character, as is Alex's over the top protestation that he "doesn't care" that Wylie's gay. The guy's sexual preference is a really small part of the article, but it's in the second paragraph, so that explains why Alex is talking about it. He didn't read the rest of the article.

The surprising part is that Alex thinks that: a) Stephen Hawking was a spokesperson and not a college professor, and b) that Christopher Wylie appearing a week after Hawking dies is a sign that he's his replacement.

Wylie did not just appear overnight. In the Guardian article Alex is pretending to have read, it is made clear that the writer and Wylie had been working together since around May 2017, and he was one of his confidential sources for an article about Cambridge Analytica and Brexit. He is going public now presumably driven by the guilt he feels about his actions, and likely because he senses that a lot of people he worked with may be heading to prison and he wants to get on the right side of things.

The question of this piece of the Cambridge Analytica matter is whether or not they illegally and fraudulently accessed users' data, and then have subsequently lied about it. Based on Wylie and the documents he provided the Guardian, that certainly seems to be the case, but this is a story that is going to play out in the months to come and probably only get worse. All we can conclude with confidence is that Alex is not responding to the actual issues, but creating a fake version of them to attack. 

Other than that, Alex just complains a bunch about how he is the victim in all the lawsuits he's being served with, and the tone is familiar and boring. Just an angry man yelling about imaginary versions of real lawsuits because he's too much of a coward to deal with the reality of what people are alleging.