March 22, 2018

Guests:

• Kit Cope: Kit runs Spike's Tactical, a gun maker/seller from Florida that was recently cracked down upon by YouTube. As this interview is happening, I checked and his YouTube channel is live, so I'm a little confused by their claims that it is not. Spike's Tactical is a sponsor of The Alex Jones Show, so this interview serves as a de facto commercial for them, as well as proof that Alex and everyone he associates with is under attack. Cope thinks that he is being singled out because he dared to "stand up to Antifa" when he made an ad that many saw as being very literally threatening to shoot people he arbitrarily was labeling "Antifa." Also on this episode, Cope expresses that he believes that major shootings are false flags, using crisis actors.
• Tim Harmsen: Tim is the runner of the YouTube channel Military Arms Channel. He is on to talk about how his YouTube channel was taken down, but early in the interview he makes abundantly clear that his channel is currently live. His main concern seems to be that YouTube's rules are too vague, and that may be the case. In this instance, however, they have been very clear about the new rules, and he runs afoul of them because he runs a gun store and uses the channel as advertising. His argument seems to boil down to "it's legal for me to talk about guns," but that is pretty irrelevant to the matter at hand. YouTube is not arresting him. Tim also believes the Southern Poverty Law Center is a radical "far left organization."
• Laura Loomer: Laura is a completely insane "investigative journalist," but more importantly an aggressive Islamophobe. She has actively advocated for banning Islam because she fervently believes that all Muslims are the same and she hates/fears them all. She used to work for Project Veritas and Rebel Media, which makes her unemployable at any real journalistic outlet, so she is "independent," and shows up on Alex's show from time to time, generally to bash Muslims or to claim that various acts of white terrorism were false flags. Laura seems to be in favor of political censorship of art, as she was behind the publicity stunt disruption of the June 2017 performance of Julius Caesar where Caesar was a Trump facsimile, being willingly obtuse that Shakespeare In The Park has done iterations of the show with Caesar being Obama and George W Bush in the past. She is so terrible that even most of the Alt-Right doesn't like her.
• Jon Rappoport hosted the 4th Hour, but Alex took up most of his time talking to Laura Loomer because he spent too much time talking to his gun buddies (sponsor) earlier in the show.

Narratives:

One of Alex's lead stories today is that YouTube is "banning gun videos." This is a gross mischaracterization of the actual story.

YouTube announced that it would ban videos that directly sold guns, or linked to direct gun sales. Further, they would not allow videos that demonstrate how to build gun modifications like silencers or high-capacity magazines, or even show how to install such things. Whatever your feelings are about this (we feel it makes some sense, but may be impossible to enforce), this is not "banning gun videos." People can still post videos of recreational shooting, or gun reviews, they just can't do so if they are sponsored by direct gun sales.

In an interesting turn of events, German YouTube creator Jörg Sprave has created a novel solution to this. He runs a video channel where he creates elaborate and cool slingshots, and in order to fight back against what he sees as encroachment from YouTube, he has suggested that YouTube creators form a union. Very interesting idea. Gonna guess Alex doesn't get behind that very reasonable and productive idea; he's probably just gonna yell a bunch and try to scare people into buying his pills, and his sponsor's guns.

Which brings me to the next important point: one of the reasons that Alex is particularly interested in misrepresenting YouTube's actons is that one of his sponsors is being affected.

Alex runs ads for Spike's Tactical (he even airs one in the middle of his interview with Cope), a gun maker/seller based out of Florida, and they have had their YouTube channel cracked down on, because they sell guns directly (particularly AR-15s) and have videos demonstrating gun modifications (they also made an ad recently where they kinda sorta threaten to shoot a bunch of "antifa," which most thought was in incredibly poor taste).

I understand standing up for your sponsor, but this is such a stretch. The way he is creating a complete strawman of the ban just so he can protect Spike's Tactical, seems to be letting the content of the show be led by the sponsor, which is pretty much Alex's style (see: years of warnings of imminent collapse of the dollar, while Alex's primary sponsor was a gold sales company).

Alex's primary argument seems to be that, if conservatives get in trouble for not baking a cake for a gay couple, then YouTube can't in anyway police gun videos on their platform. This logic is profoundly flawed. For instance, people who like/sell guns are not a federally protected class, and the Civil Rights Act does not protect people who just like guns.

In the end, the only things they can come up with to resolve any of their perceived grievances  go 100% against Alex's principles. The fact that they are advocating for regulations on a private business (YouTube) and forming a union to protect their rights as "employees" (or "creators") just goes to show that, for Alex and his ilk, philosophies and belief go out the window when they feel threatened.

Also on this episode, Alex plays large segments of Donald Trump's speech announcing new tariffs on China because of their copyright infringement. This is very likely going to lead to a trade war that will hurt the American middle and lower classes very badly. Before Trump made his announcement, Chinese state newspaper China Daily warned:

“History has shown the pinpricks of protectionism can ultimately lead to the shots of war somewhere down the line.”

Not very subtle.

The timing for this is particularly bad, since Xi Jinping recently declared himself "supreme leader for life," and as such cannot afford to show any weakness in the position, thus you can expect that he will respond harshly. Considering that China has a myriad of options at their disposal to hurt the US far more than these tariffs will hurt them (levying export taxes, increasing security inspections, delaying paperwork, messing with customs operations, etc.), and the fact that the US needs China's assistance to address the situation in North Korea peacefully, Trump's behavior is a very troubling development.

Most likely, he is posturing to try to show strength in a negotiation that will end up leading us directly back to where we were before, with Trump "virtue-signaling" to his base that he is "hard on China." Hopefully that's the case, because the other way this could go is a trade war in which the United States is woefully outgunned.

Laura Loomer shows up toward the end of the show to talk about a new "undercover sting" she carried out at a meeting in preparation for the Parkland students who were going to the March For Our Lives. You can watch all of it if you have the patience for like five minutes of choppily edited audio, but based on my viewing of it, all she really captured on tape is a teacher admitting that they don't have a permit for a march, but instead for a rally, so after the rally, they may all leave the same direction. This happens at pretty much every rally ever.

On Alex's show, she makes some incredibly fucked up accusations that her video does not show. She says that the teacher, Debby Miller, tells the students in attendance that "Jews run politicians." This is complete bullshit.

Debby Miller is discussing how it is not going to be raining on Saturday, the day of the rally, at which point, she makes the following joke:

“I would say something about the politician who said the Jews were in control of weather, so come on.”

The joke lacks a punchline, certainly, but she is clearly referencing the DC Council Member, Trayon White, who last week said:

“It just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation. That’s a model based off the Rothschilds, controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”

Councilman White quickly become a laughingstock on the internet, and he was roundly denounced by organizations Jewish and not-Jewish alike for his very clearly antisemitic statement.

This is what Debby Miller is making a joke about, and the joke is actually even funnier when you consider that Laura Loomer is going on Alex Jones' show to misrepresent Miller's words to paint her as an antisemite, when in reality she is making a joke about an idiot politician spouting antisemitic rhetoric, who was most likely influenced to believe that the Rothschilds control the weather from listening to Alex Jones. It is a propaganda ouroboros. Laura Loomer really, really sucks at this.

The only other thing Laura has to really "reveal" is that the Gifford Organization, a pro-gun regulation advocacy group run by Gabrielle Giffords, is involved in the organization of the rally. This is not surprising or scandalous for a number of reasons:

1. Giffords you may remember as the former US Representative who was shot in the head at a constituent meeting back in 2011. She survived, but six people were killed including federal District Court Chief Judge John Roll and a 9 year-old girl. The killer was Jared Lee Loughner, who left a trail of of very InfoWars-like rhetoric behind in blog posts, saying stuff like "the government is brainwashing people by controlling language," something that Alex Jones says all the time.
2. Since that point, Giffords has been very active in pushing for gun control measures, for pretty understandable reasons.
3. It would be a little absurd to expect high school students to organize something like this without support from some relevant community organization. Alex's people seem to be so obsessed with demanding that everything be "organic," not realizing that every rally they participate in has some Koch-related think tank or similar entity looming in the background and they can't even fall back on the "I'm 17 years old and have no life experience" excuse.

All in all, most of this show was Alex talking to gun guys about gun stuff, and how they're being oppressed. Very little of it was interesting, almost none of it reflected the real world. Other than that, it was just Alex killing time and Laura Loomer being a real big idiot.