April 3, 2018
Guests:
- Matt Bracken: Bracken is a guy who has been in the armed services. We know that much, but it's not super clear what his experience entails. What we do know for sure is that Bracken has written a number of books about his societal collapse fantasies, books that suspiciously track very closely with the InfoWars view of what the future is going to look like. Bracken has a real serious streak of being an anti-Islamic bigot, but perhaps most importantly, he has drew a diagram of what he thinks the second Civil War ("CW2") is going to look like, and it is ludicrous. The scheme he envisions may be just a little more focused on race divisions than how someone who is not racist might see the world.
- Jerome Corsi: Corsi is a complete pile of shit. He was trained by Edward Bernays as a propagandist, and has plied his trade shilling for the right wing for years. He has written multiple books about how Barack Obama's birth certificate is fake, and his writing was an integral part of the disgraceful smear campaign against John Kerry, the Swiftboating, during the 2004 election. Over his time at InfoWars, he's been responsible for some of the worst reporting on staff, because he tries to go big, which inevitably involves him faceplanting, most entertainingly in the time he tried to team with Joe Arpaio's team to push bullshit, or the time he pretended he'd uncovered a scoop that would get him murdered by "the Globalists." In early 2018, Corsi lost his mind and started spending all his time "decoding" messages left on message boards by "QAnon." It is looking like this is the final embarrassing chapter in a profoundly embarrassing career.
Narratives:
Today is mostly about sales. Alex is doing long, long commercials through most of the show. If I had to guess, I would say that this is probably because in the last 24 hours, both Alex and Roger Stone have been served new lawsuits related to their on-air activities on InfoWars.
The lawsuit against Alex is a little weak, and even though Alex's behavior is terrible, he's probably completely protected by the freedom of the press in the case that is being brought against him.
Roger, on the other hand, could get hit pretty hard. If the guy suing him can prove that Roger made inaccurate claims/accusations about him on InfoWars, that could end in a legitimate slander/libel case. Malicious intent is very hard to prove in court, but if there's one guy who it would be pretty easy to demonstrate having malicious intent, it would be Roger.
We will see how that all plays out, but for now, suffice it to say that Alex knows he needs a ton of money because this onslaught of lawsuits is probably not going to end any time soon.
In the middle of the show, Alex sits down with Matt Bracken to talk about how Trump has indicated that he is sending military troops to the Mexican border to defend against...caravans of immigrants? Whatever the reality is with this caravan, Alex is reporting this news for the same reason Trump is: trying to score points with their audience over non-issues. In this case, Mexico had already stopped the caravan at least 12 hours before Alex got on air and reported that it was an emergency.
Whether or not it is wise to deal with civilian populations trying to seek asylum by deploying the military is a larger issue and not something we can settle today. Actually we can; it's a horrible idea.
Another horrible idea is something that Alex says in his interview with Bracken:
That is next-level dangerous rhetoric. Historically, people saying that you need to keep your eyes on a certain population is a very negative thing. It usually comes from an unhealthy place, especially when you are implying that the reason to keep an eye on them is to kill them once it is the time to kill (which Alex constantly makes clear that that time will come).
Alex is absolutely trying to incite violence, and make no mistake about it, the "Globalists" aren't a real group. It is a dog-whistle term for Jews, and it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that Alex's audience does not understand this on some level. The idea that he is telling his audience to keep an eye on the "Globalist" in your town is a very, very fucked up thing for him to say, but it is probably just barely on the right side of free speech laws.
At the end of the show, Alex plays a bit from a "documentary" he shot where he goes to Ted Nugent's ranch and the two of them talked shit about liberals and shot guns a bunch. It's a mess, and knowing Ted Nugent's dicey history, I just have a tough time taking anything he says as sincere. He's an asshole who loves guns and being in charge; all the rest of the supposed principles are just bullshit. Everyone on InfoWars is a conman.