March 27, 2018
Guests:
- Ben Garrison: Garrison is perhaps the most prominent conservative political cartoonist alive today. Incidentally, he's also terrible at political cartooning. It's not even that his conservative worldview is what makes the cartoons bad, it's more that he has a strange habit of labeling everything in his cartoons which is really the sign of a lack of craft. If the point you're trying to make isn't clear without labels on everything, it may be a sign that you need to work harder. Garrison appears on the show in a silly cowboy hat, which I did enjoy.
- Jack Posobiec: Posobiec is a Trump-hack "journalist" who also seriously pushed the idea that Pizzagate was a sex dungeon in the non-existent basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza. He was outed as being in "military intelligence," but in reality what that meant was that he was doing piss tests on Marines. Jack has had his hands in far too many fraudulent media propaganda campaigns (Macron Leaks, the "Rape Melania" sign, etc) to detail all of them. Alex treats him as if he is some kind of expert on international relations, which is hilarious. Jack really sucks.
Narratives:
On this show, Alex unveils a video (made by Darren McBreen) which shows footage from the March For Our Lives, mostly footage of the kids who survived the Parkland shooting and aren't thrilled about having to have gone through that, and juxtaposes it with audio of Hitler:
A lot of people got understandably mad about this, but as far as I can tell, this is just one of Alex's standard publicity stunts. He knows that if he does something like this, thousands of people will tweet about him, people will write articles about him, and he will get an absurd amount of free press. He's the P.T. Barnum of bigoted political speech.
Alex's rhetoric is repulsive, and he should be ashamed of himself, but this is still an instance of him operating within the realm of free speech to a certain extent. Society would be much better off if they ignored him when he says stuff like this, and made a bigger deal of his overt white nationalism (last week, he said that "whites are being exterminated in Rhodesia").
Once Alex gets to the news, one of his main stories is about how former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has come out against the 2nd amendment:
Alex is referring to an opinion piece that Stevens wrote for The New York Times, and I am guessing that Alex just read the headline, "Repeal The Second Amendment" and that was enough for him to know what it was all about.
The argument that Stevens is making is that until 2008, in District of Columbia vs. Heller, the second amendment was not legally understood to mean that individuals had the right to own guns. That was an issue left unsettled by the Supreme Court until then, and even in that decision, the judges came to a 5-4 decision.
Before then, the second amendment was more or less understood in its historical context, specifically that states had the right to keep militias to protect themselves from encroachment by other states or the federal government. It is a matter of great debate whether or not this was ever intended to guarantee the right of an individual to own a firearm.
The argument that Stevens lays out is that the National Rifle Association, a special interest group, is behind the muddying of the waters. Their deceitful efforts to apply the second amendment to fight against any regulations about gun ownership went so far that former Chief Justice Burger said that the NRA was perpetuating "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
Stevens suggests that the second amendment, as a guarantee of the right to maintain a militia, is obsolete. Further, the second amendment, as a guarantee of the right to individual ownership of guns, is not a fully decided matter. As such, he says that gun-control advocates should just try to propose a new amendment that would undo the second amendment, which would in turn cripple the NRA's ability to block legislation that would protect citizens.
I'm not sure if I totally agree with his argument, but I respect it as being offered in good faith by someone who knows the issues, and I do not think Alex read the article.
The truth is that there is no need to repeal an amendment, since even in DC vs. Heller, the decision provided by the Supreme Court very clearly pointed out that the second amendment is compatible with gun-control regulations:
“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms”
The debate is not Pro-Gun People vs. Anti-Gun People; what we are living in is a coordinated campaign against rationality and decency being carried out by the NRA and the media/political figures that they have paid off.
Around the second hour of the show, Alex has political cartoonist Ben Garrison on the show, and what ends up happening is a pretty hilarious scene. Alex's earpiece isn't working at the beginning of the interview, so he is unable to communicate with Garrison:
In order to deal with this, Alex just has Garrison vamp and ramble while he tries to fix his earpiece behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Alex forgot to turn off his mic, and some of his yelling was caught on air while Garrison was trying to make some stupid point about Karl Marx:
The rest of the interview is not really that interesting. It's just Alex telling Garrison that his work is perfect. It's so good, says Alex. Consider below, a sample of Garrison's work:
If you zoom in, you'll see "Gang" as a label on the guy's head inside the saloon that has no ice.
Also, considering that Alex and Roger Stone are currently pushing the narrative that Jeff Sessions has dementia and needs to be taken out of office, I'm not sure even Alex would sign off on this one. Odds are Alex doesn't even like Garrison's work, he's probably just angling for a way to sell his comics on InfoWars' website and make a little cut of the money.
On this episode, Alex begins to predict that "something big" is coming, and that he feels a "disturbance in the force that he hasn't felt since just before 9/11." This sounds pretty extreme, but it's that language is something he employs all the time. Just trying to get the audience good and scared, so they're in a state of mind to buy his products.