April 18, 2018

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Guests:

  • Sabo: Sabo is a "conservative street artist." I guess he's like a Banksy, but instead of making you think, he puts up Trump-centric propaganda around cities. Technically what he does is illegal, so Alex has to do a really stupid dance to keep himself legally protected, while also encouraging his audience to do more of what Sabo does. Sabo seems to think that "conservatism" (which by his definition is the Trump version of the alt-right) is "the new punk." This metaphor might be reasonable, if in 1977 the Sex Pistols' music was all about glorifying the DuPont family.
  • Zaq: Zaq (or Zach, it's unclear) is a caller who Alex insists is a high-level intelligence community operative. They've played out a very compelling radio drama together, where Zaq appeared on Alex's show, then was caught by the FBI who was mad that he was talking to Alex. Zaq was taken to a FBI base to be interrogated and have his phone searched. He was told not to talk to Alex anymore, at which point he called Alex and talked to him again. Then, he fled to Morocco. None of this is real, and Zaq as a character exists almost entirely because Alex is jealous of the internet having a fake source in the form of QAnon to obsess over, so he made one of his own. 

Narratives:

Again, we are stuck in a holding pattern of Alex Jones being super defensive on air about how he is being sued by just about everyone in the world. We have already discussed in detail how Alex is lying through his teeth about his positions on Sandy Hook, but that the relevant comments are likely past the statute of limitations, so he may be off the hook.

On this show, he repeats his standard lines creating fake timelines about his comments about Sandy Hook, and creating strawman versions of the accusations against him to respond to. It's very boring.

Generally speaking, Alex knows fully well where the line is between "free speech" and "slander," and he walks right up to that line all the time. On this episode, he does an extended riff about how he thinks James Comey looks like a pedophile:

This is some hilariously weak stuff from Alex. Usually, he doesn't actually call out in the middle of his rants that he's aware that it would be illegal to say what he's implying, but that since it's just an implication, it's legal. Is this what he has been reduced to? Impotently lashing out at the appearance of his political enemies while reminding them that they can't sue him for it? What a mess.

A little later, Alex has an interview with "conservative street artist" Sabo. Most of the interview is Alex trying to spitball ideas for an InfoWars art department (always trying to find new revenue streams) with Sabo and Ben Garrison being the main elements. We predict this will go just as well as Alex's 2015 idea about starting a "Patriot Music" record label.

Because he's talking to a street artist, Alex is hot and bothered about how street art is the key to destroying the "Globalists." It's an interesting line that Alex has to walk because he knows that vandalism is illegal, so he can't outright tell his audience to go out and deface billboards, but he kind of does.

There are two very serious problems with Sabo's appearance on the show.

The first is that he seems to just be a Trump propagandist, working in a different medium. He doesn't seem to have any positive points, just standing for the belief that liberals are bad and he wants to attack them. He describes what he thinks is the difference between his team and liberals:

See, this is an interesting perspective. On the one hand, I kind of agree with him. Conservatives do just want to have BBQs and enjoy the inequitable system that is in place, languishing in a blissfully unaware state of all the (generally racist or sexist) injustices upon which their comfort is built. The liberals he is afraid of are politically active because they have reached a point where they realize that our society is in such need of sincere renovation that to not actively work toward that, to just sit idly by and "have a BBQ," is ethically the same as supporting the underlying injustices.

On the other hand, I don't think he meant it that way.

The other thing about Sabo's appearance that is a little troubling is that he kind of implies that he had advance notice of the propaganda campaign against Al Franken before it went live, and that someone enlisted him to put the billboard up on short notice:

You know who else mysteriously knew about the allegations before they came out? Noted political dirty trick man and InfoWars regular Roger Stone. Probably a coincidence.

Later in the show, Alex has Millie Weaver on to talk about how she went to a #MeToo speech in Akron, OH the night before and people were mean to her.

There is some true comedy in the sloppily thrown together video she made:

  1. Millie is at a speech, and she asks the speaker, "why are you excluding Bill Clinton's victims?" to which the speaker responds, "who says we're excluding anyone?" Millie's question is not a question, it is an accusation, and the only thing she has to back up her accusation seems to be "Juanita Broaderick wasn't in Time Magazine." That seems like a misdirected question. She should be talking to the editors of Time.
  2. Millie's question that she asks the speaker boils down to "are you concerned that the #MeToo movement is in danger of becoming partisan?" The problem is that this question, in and of itself, is an attempt to politicize the issue. She prefaces the question by calling Bill Clinton a rapist and accusing the speaker of not caring about Juanita Broaderick, et al, which clearly demonstrates what her real intention with the question was. It is a bad faith question, and no matter the answer given, Millie intended to use the footage she captured to attack the speaker and the gathering.
  3. Millie very clearly edits the footage to make it look like a march of protesters spontaneously appeared as soon as she walked out of the building, trying to give the impression that they were there specifically to assault her. Alex says as much, "they were activated from a garage!" It is very clear from context clues that this march took place after the speech, and Millie waited around and then cut it together to bolster the idea that protests/marches are not sincere expressions of speech and people's right to congregate.

This is a pathetic display of sloppy, poorly thought out propaganda. It reaches its logical conclusion when Alex ties in the fake "Antifa/Soros contracts" that his intern found on 4chan and Alex is pretending are real, and how they prove that Antifa is getting paid to wait in garages in case someone from InfoWars shows up somewhere, so they can flash-protest against them. It's absurd.

After that nonsense, Alex's "very real" high-level intelligence source Zach stops by to drop some info. I can tell you in one sentence how I know that Zach isn't a real source: Alex says that he only has Zach for a very short time on the show today, yet Alex goes to commercial in the middle of the appearance and insists on blowing hard for minutes while Zach waits on hold.

The thrust of Zach's information seems to be intended to reinforce Alex's narrative that Nikki Haley is a big villain, and that she is trying to undermine Trump so she and Pence can run together in 2020:

To answer Alex's question if I have noticed that the media keeps saying that "Pence can do no wrong?" I have not. I definitely have not noticed that.

Mysteriously, Zach was very critical of Trump last Friday night when Alex was "turning on Trump," but now that Alex has gone back and adjusted his stance, Zach seems to have adjusted his "high end intelligence briefings" right along with it to match exactly where Alex is. So weird.