March 20, 2018
Guests:
- Mark Meechan: Meechan is an idiot from the UK who got in trouble because he posted a video of himself training his dog to give a Hitler Salute when he said "Sieg Heil" or "gas the Jews." The same day he is appearing on InfoWars, he was found guilty in a Scottish court of having committed a hate crime. The issue is that in the UK, "the first amendment" as we understand it does not exist, and if you say things that are intentionally inflammatory, you can be held accountable for the results of your actions, so Alex and Mark do not really have a leg to stand on. Mark's defense hinged on his insistence that he had trained his dog to do this, and made the video, to annoy his girlfriend, but that sort of implies that his girlfriend (or Mark himself) says "Sieg Heil" or "gas the Jews" enough that she would even notice. If neither of them ever said shit like that, there's no real payoff to this as a prank. Oh, also, Mark is on the show along with noted career criminal/con man/anti-Muslim agitator Tommy Robinson, so his credibility as a "not racist person" is in the toilet.
- Alexander Nekrassov: Nekrassov is a former (?) Kremlin presidential adviser, and has been involved with the Russian government for about the last two decades. He has a long history of writing for publications such as Al Jazeera and others about topics like how Marine Le Pen is great and it's not a problem that Russian state banks donated millions to her campaign, or how Putin is the good guy in Ukraine. He seems to have a pretty consistent messaging with state media outlets. In his interview, he literally tells Alex that when he worked for the Kremlin, he was a "fixer," and his job would be to work behind the scenes. Alex does not grasp that he is being worked over by a high-level foreign government fixer live on air at any point.
Narratives:
The first half-hour of the show today seems to have one goal in mind: sow doubt about the stories that are coming out about Cambridge Analytica, the data company run by Trump's former campaign manager Steve Bannon, and funded by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.
In the days previous to March 20, Channel 4 in the UK started revealing the results of a four month investigation into Cambridge Analytica, which included undercover recordings of their CEO Alexander Nix (who has now been suspended pending an investigation) admitting that their techniques of getting people elected to lead countries all over the world often involved blackmail and dissemination of propaganda.
The investigation is very illuminating and calls into very serious question how badly fooled Alex was by a propaganda marketing firm. The videos show an executive explaining how he had come up with "Crooked Hillary" as a "brand" to sell, and in one of the more troubling pieces, he explains how they would get their information out:
“Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there, you feed them...activist groups, we use them, feed them the material, and they do the work.
And so, this stuff infiltrates the online community, and expands, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”
That sounds a lot like the beginning of a process that Alex Jones is in the middle/end of. How much he is even aware of his role, or how aware Roger Stone is of what is going on, are fascinating questions I'm excited to hear both men lie about in the coming weeks.
All the pieces of this Channel 4 investigation is worth watching, but the part I've embedded below is the portion that is most relevant to our purposes, as it deals with some things learned about Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign.
This is a major deal, and the things that are starting to come out look like they may hint to some sort of coordination of propaganda messaging in the entirety of the Trump campaign, whether Alex was privy to the coordination, or he was just a useful idiot.
Alex probably doesn't know about these videos when he goes on air on March 20, because he's generally a bit behind on "news that looks really bad for him," so he's probably just minimizing the revelations made by Christopher Wylie, who worked at Cambridge Analytica and has recently gone public with some troubling accusations about their data-harvesting techniques, among other concerns.
Whatever the case, Alex paints the scenario as being that Facebook is the "real bad guy," going so far as to suggest that the social media site was created to get you to kill yourself.
In other news, there was another bombing in Austin, and Alex is continuing to pretend that the "inside information" he broadcast about a week back is accurate, but in reality it has been completely refuted. Consider the following:
- Alex said that his sources told him that the bomber was creating the bombs on the porches where they were left and that it takes about 20 min. We now have clear evidence of multiple of these bombs being sent by the mail, with the most recent one exploding at the FedEx center.
- Alex clearly said that his source told him that the bombs could not be moved (hence why they were built on the porch, in broad daylight), but the bomb that killed Draylen Mason was moved from the porch into the kitchen, where it then blew up. This literally disproves Alex's claims.
- Alex said that his source told him that the bombs were very amateurish, and to an external observer with no fake inside sources, that seemed like a pretty good assumption back then. Time has shown that this is probably a bit more sophisticated a situation than previously thought.
- Alex is now saying that the bombs "are mousetraps," which I can't tell if he's saying as a reference to the trap for mice or a reference to the board game.
He is just making shit up as he goes along and pretending it's coming from legitimate sources, and it's amazingly embarrassing if you take the time to keep track and watch how the lies change over time when his "inside information" is proven to be nonsense.
Alex excitedly comes back from a commercial break to announce that RT is reporting that Trump is going to meet up with Putin over concerns about "an out-of-control arms race." This combines with his interview with former (?) Kremlin adviser Alexander Nekrassov about how great Putin's reelection is to create a show that is largely pushing the viewpoint of Russian state media, as opposed to an in anyway unbiased analysis of the news. This should in no way be shocking, as Alex has admitted on air that he has spoken privately with active Russian intelligence agents.
Alex is a spineless sycophant, asking Nekrassov at one point, "why do Russians love Putin so much?"
Taken in a vacuum, that is just a soft, bad question for a journalist to ask. That is the sort of question that only really leads to an answer that is propaganda, which is why it is the sort of question that Alex asks this former (?) Kremlin adviser, who openly admits on the show that he is a "fixer."
If you're keeping score, Alex is running a media program, and has this former (?) Kremlin adviser on, who goes on to explain that formerly (?) his job was to intercede and fix things when Putin and the Kremlin did things that maybe didn't go over well with foreign media programs. Alex is a very dumb man.
Roger Stone pops in for a little while to pitch the narrative that Jeff Sessions is mentally unfit to continue in his role as Attorney General, and Alex chimes in that he may have "had a stroke." This is likely because they are aware that Sessions is probably not stupid enough to fire Mueller, and they really, really need someone to derail that investigation. If Sessions won't do it, you gotta turn on Sessions.
Alex gets into a video of Congressman Nicholas Suozzi, who made some unfortunate comments in a town hall meeting that appeared to have been held at a VFW hall. Suozzi was asked what people could do if Trump continued to ignore the courts, and his response was not great: "This is where the Second Amendment comes in quite frankly, because you know, what if the President was to ignore the courts? What would you do? What would we do?"
Alex is quick to forget that on the campaign trail, in front of a substantially larger crowd, Donald Trump said about Hillary Clinton, "by the way, and if she gets to pick --if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."
Stupid Alex Jones style hypocrisy aside, this comment threw Alex into a tailspin where he is now advocating on his show that it is time to have a serious conversation about politically motivated violence:
This is incredibly scary rhetoric coming from an unhinged lunatic who is doing "spiritual battle" with an imaginary enemy. It's even scarier that he goes on to advocate that Trump take out his political rivals, using covert means:
Hmmm. That makes me think of this one other guy who Alex is a big fan of who seems to like using "covert actions" to take out his political rivals and dissenters. What a crazy coincidence that one of that guy's former (?) advisers was a guest on Alex's show earlier.