April 5, 2018 — Knowledge Fight

Guests:

None. Roger Stone pops in for an hour to create strawman arguments about how he's getting sued and people are starting to point out inconsistencies in his story about whether or not he's talked to Julian Assange in the lead up to their release of hacked emails. He doesn't count as a guest because he's on every day, but today's appearance was a little longer than usual.

Narratives:

Alex spends a lot of the beginning of the show repeating bullshit narratives about George Soros. Once again, it is a tactic Alex is employing to kill time and run out the clock between ads, while spreading antisemitic slanders left and right.

In terms of actual revelations of this show, there's not a whole lot. One thing we learn is that Alex's planned "press conference" (read: "publicity stunt") at the DC Press Club (which anyone can rent out to create the air of legitimacy around their lunatic nonsense) will involve him announcing the first two of ten lawsuits Alex is filing against "enemies of the republic." Fingers crossed that we are one of them.

The only thing in this episode probably worth mentioning is Alex celebrating Donald Trump's move to send military to the Mexican border to "protect the country."

This is a complicated issue, and I think a lot of people criticizing Alex for this are not attacking it in the right way. Here is the situation, as I see it.

For most of his career, Alex Jones has been severely anti-cop and anti-military. During the Bush and Obama presidencies, he viewed these service people as being tools of an evil government, and he was against them, almost universally. He would be careful to say that there were some good cops and some good soldiers, but he was clear that he was against the organizations in the bigger picture.

He would constantly rail on the Posse Comitatus Act and how that made it illegal for the military to operate in any way involving domestic policies. During Jade Helm in 2015, he made a huge deal out of how this was an encroachment of Posse Comitatus. That is only one of the more high-profile instances where he screamed about domestic use of the military.

Now, where things get murky about calling Alex a hypocrite for supporting Trump in this move is that the troops Trump is sending are National Guard troops, which are not included in the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act. Saying that Alex is being inconsistent here is not quite fair.

However, the Posse Comitatus Act does make it very clear that it was only referring to the Army and Air Force. National Guard troops can be sent in to aid in a situation, if they are invited to do so by that state's governor. It turns out that some of the states involved do not want the National Guard to come in and "help," so this is where things could get messy.

Further, there is a precedent that when the President deems it necessary to enforce federal laws, they may decide to send in troops in contradiction of the act. The issue with this being Alex's justification for supporting Trump's actions is that: 1) the troops are likely not going to be enforcing legitimate federal laws, and 2) he would never allow this kind of argument if it were a different president doing it.

My bottom line point about this is that, according to the Posse Comitatus Act, the act of sending in the National Guard is up to the governors of the states. As long as Alex is in recognition of this, he's not being a complete hypocrite.

The rest of the show is stupid deflections about the lawsuits that are being filed against Alex and Roger Stone. Roger comes on to defend himself about that email he sent saying he'd "dined with Assange" (it was a joke), but mysteriously does not bring up how he is being sued for $100 million by Miles Kwok, who is claiming defamation that Roger did on InfoWars. He probably doesn't want to talk about that, because he is most likely in serious trouble on that front.