141: March 20-22, 2018

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Today, Dan tells Jordan all about the events of the last week on The Alex Jones Show. The topics covered range from Laura Loomer lying about her own reporting, Alex being dumb about the McCarthyism, and Alex saying something so racist it is baffling.

Tidbits

• Count Dankula went on Infowars to defend himself for teaching his dog to give a Nazi salute to prank his girlfriend in a situation that would never happen
• "former" Russian intelligence officer Alexander Nekrassov appears to explain why "Russians love Putin so much" and directly admits that he is a propagandist
• Cambridge Analytica briefly comes up and Alex does a terrible Bill Clinton impression
• Alex gets into the disappearance of Seth Rich, primarily the "top investigator" Jack Burkman, and lies about his getting shot by another crazy person, Kevin Doherty
• Burkman is a Trump connected lobbyist
• Wikileaks got info about Seth Rich from Russian intelligence cutout, according to Daily Beast, info which was in turn promoted by Roger Stone
• Alex tries to conflate a reward from Seth Rich's family with Burkman's nonsense
• Jordan explains the myth about carrots and strong vision
• Alex holds forth on armored redoubts and, with Dr. Group, talks about "Disease X". Dan debunks this.
• To Alex's horror, Obama is in New Zealand, building an escape bunker because Peter Thiel did.

Notable Bits

• Alex's Bill Clinton impression,

References

• Daily Beast
• Washington Examiner

Detailed Show Notes

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

Guests

• Mark Meechan: Meechan is an idiot from the UK who got in trouble because he posted a video of himself training his dog to give a Hitler Salute when he said "Sieg Heil" or other extremely anti-Semitic things which trigger the Fandom content filter if reproduced. The same day he is appearing on InfoWars, he was found guilty in a Scottish court of having committed a hate crime. The issue is that in the UK, "the first amendment" as we understand it does not exist, and if you say things that are intentionally inflammatory, you can be held accountable for the results of your actions, so Alex and Mark do not really have a leg to stand on. Mark's defense hinged on his insistence that he had trained his dog to do this, and made the video, to annoy his girlfriend, but that sort of implies that his girlfriend (or Mark himself) says Nazi stuff enough that she would even notice. If neither of them ever said shit like that, there's no real payoff to this as a prank. Oh, also, Mark is on the show along with noted career criminal/con man/anti-Muslim agitator Tommy Robinson, so his credibility as a "not racist person" is in the toilet.
• Alexander Nekrassov: Nekrassov is a former (?) Kremlin presidential adviser, and has been involved with the Russian government for about the last two decades. He has a long history of writing for publications such as Al Jazeera and others about topics like how Marine Le Pen is great and it's not a problem that Russian state banks donated millions to her campaign, or how Putin is the good guy in Ukraine. He seems to have a pretty consistent messaging with state media outlets. In his interview, he literally tells Alex that when he worked for the Kremlin, he was a "fixer," and his job would be to work behind the scenes. Alex does not grasp that he is being worked over by a high-level foreign government fixer live on air at any point.

Narratives

The first half-hour of the show today seems to have one goal in mind: sow doubt about the stories that are coming out about Cambridge Analytica, the data company run by Trump's former campaign manager Steve Bannon, and funded by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.

In the days previous to March 20, Channel 4 in the UK started revealing the results of a four month investigation into Cambridge Analytica, which included undercover recordings of their CEO Alexander Nix (who has now been suspended pending an investigation) admitting that their techniques of getting people elected to lead countries all over the world often involved blackmail and dissemination of propaganda.

The investigation is very illuminating and calls into very serious question how badly fooled Alex was by a propaganda marketing firm. The videos show an executive explaining how he had come up with "Crooked Hillary" as a "brand" to sell, and in one of the more troubling pieces, he explains how they would get their information out:

"Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there, you feed them...activist groups, we use them, feed them the material, and they do the work.

And so, this stuff infiltrates the online community, and expands, but with no branding, so it's unattributable, untrackable.

"

- Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global

That sounds a lot like the beginning of a process that Alex Jones is in the middle/end of. How much he is even aware of his role, or how aware Roger Stone is of what is going on, are fascinating questions I'm excited to hear both men lie about in the coming weeks.

All the pieces of this Channel 4 investigation is worth watching, but the part I've embedded below is the portion that is most relevant to our purposes, as it deals with some things learned about Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign.

This is a major deal, and the things that are starting to come out look like they may hint to some sort of coordination of propaganda messaging in the entirety of the Trump campaign, whether Alex was privy to the coordination, or he was just a useful idiot.

Alex probably doesn't know about these videos when he goes on air on March 20, because he's generally a bit behind on "news that looks really bad for him," so he's probably just minimizing the revelations made by Christopher Wylie, who worked at Cambridge Analytica and has recently gone public with some troubling accusations about their data-harvesting techniques, among other concerns.

Whatever the case, Alex paints the scenario as being that Facebook is the "real bad guy," going so far as to suggest that the social media site was created to get you to kill yourself.

In other news, there was another bombing in Austin, and Alex is continuing to pretend that the "inside information" he broadcast about a week back is accurate, but in reality it has been completely refuted. Consider the following:

• Alex said that his sources told him that the bomber was creating the bombs on the porches where they were left and that it takes about 20 min. We now have clear evidence of multiple of these bombs being sent by the mail, with the most recent one exploding at the FedEx center.
• Alex clearly said that his source told him that the bombs could not be moved (hence why they were built on the porch, in broad daylight), but the bomb that killed Draylen Mason was moved from the porch into the kitchen, where it then blew up. This literally disproves Alex's claims.
• Alex said that his source told him that the bombs were very amateurish, and to an external observer with no fake inside sources, that seemed like a pretty good assumption back then. Time has shown that this is probably a bit more sophisticated a situation than previously thought.
• Alex is now saying that the bombs "are mousetraps," which I can't tell if he's saying as a reference to the trap for mice or a reference to the board game.

He is just making shit up as he goes along and pretending it's coming from legitimate sources, and it's amazingly embarrassing if you take the time to keep track and watch how the lies change over time when his "inside information" is proven to be nonsense.

Alex excitedly comes back from a commercial break to announce that RT is reporting that Trump is going to meet up with Putin over concerns about "an out-of-control arms race." This combines with his interview with former (?) Kremlin adviser Alexander Nekrassov about how great Putin's reelection is to create a show that is largely pushing the viewpoint of Russian state media, as opposed to an in anyway unbiased analysis of the news. This should in no way be shocking, as Alex has admitted on air that he has spoken privately with active Russian intelligence agents.

Alex is a spineless sycophant, asking Nekrassov at one point, "why do Russians love Putin so much?"

Taken in a vacuum, that is just a soft, bad question for a journalist to ask. That is the sort of question that only really leads to an answer that is propaganda, which is why it is the sort of question that Alex asks this former (?) Kremlin adviser, who openly admits on the show that he is a "fixer."

If you're keeping score, Alex is running a media program, and has this former (?) Kremlin adviser on, who goes on to explain that formerly (?) his job was to intercede and fix things when Putin and the Kremlin did things that maybe didn't go over well with foreign media programs. Alex is a very dumb man.

Roger Stone pops in for a little while to pitch the narrative that Jeff Sessions is mentally unfit to continue in his role as Attorney General, and Alex chimes in that he may have "had a stroke." This is likely because they are aware that Sessions is probably not stupid enough to fire Mueller, and they really, really need someone to derail that investigation. If Sessions won't do it, you gotta turn on Sessions.

Alex gets into a video of Congressman Nicholas Suozzi, who made some unfortunate comments in a town hall meeting that appeared to have been held at a VFW hall. Suozzi was asked what people could do if Trump continued to ignore the courts, and his response was not great: "This is where the Second Amendment comes in quite frankly, because you know, what if the President was to ignore the courts? What would you do? What would we do?"

Alex is quick to forget that on the campaign trail, in front of a substantially larger crowd, Donald Trump said about Hillary Clinton, "by the way, and if she gets to pick --if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

Stupid Alex Jones style hypocrisy aside, this comment threw Alex into a tailspin where he is now advocating on his show that it is time to have a serious conversation about politically motivated violence:

This is incredibly scary rhetoric coming from an unhinged lunatic who is doing "spiritual battle" with an imaginary enemy. It's even scarier that he goes on to advocate that Trump take out his political rivals, using covert means:

Hmmm. That makes me think of this one other guy who Alex is a big fan of who seems to like using "covert actions" to take out his political rivals and dissenters. What a crazy coincidence that one of that guy's former (?) advisers was a guest on Alex's show earlier.

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

Guests

• Dr. Edward Group: Dr. Group is not a doctor, he is a chiropractor. He has a bunch of degrees from the Natural Healing Institute of Naturopathy, which from many indications is just the sort of place where if you pay for their "classes," you get a degree. He seems to think his parents may have been in the Illuminati, and claims his dad invented Saran Wrap, and that his life's work is undoing the damage his father did by "working with plastics."
• Alex and Roger Stone host the 4th Hour. It is not notable.

Narratives

Alex opens the show by completely misrepresenting a story about a man who was attacked, who happened to be "researching" the death of Seth Rich. Alex's version of the story is that the attacked man, Jack Burkman, was somehow working in an official capacity as an investigator, and the attacker Kevin Doherty was an assassin sent to kill him for not backing down, and that he was a Marine who was involved with the Department of Energy, implying that said department was involved in the attack.

In reality, this is an instance not of a political hit-job, but a case of one crazy person offending another crazy person and attacking him:

"Jack Burkman told The Washington Post that he had hired Kevin Doherty to help him build a psychological profile of Rich's killer...Burkman fired Doherty in July 2017 and moved on to investigating the FBI. In February, Burkman was contacted by a man who claimed to have information on then-deputy director Andrew McCabe."

Spoiler alert: that guy who contacted him was Doherty, and he did not have info on McCabe, he had the intention of killing Burkman. One of the drawbacks of living in the world of "conspiracy," especially these days, is that the people you are going to be working with are generally going to be very dangerous people who don't take rejection well.

This has nothing to do with Seth Rich's actual death, and it is absolutely disgraceful to suggest it does, without any evidence beyond that Burkman believed unfounded theories about Rich.

Interestingly, one thing Alex doesn't bring up is that Jack Burkman is a Trump-connected lobbyist, who has raised money for Rick Gates in the past. If you'll recall, Rick Gates is Paul Manafort's associate (and Trump campaign member) who recently plead guilty to lying to the FBI and "conspiracy against the United States." Probably just a coincidence.

Another of Alex's large narratives he's pushing on this show is that the "Globalists" are about to flee to their "armored redoubts," which if you have paid any attention, is a narrative Alex screams about approximately every other month. When inevitably nothing happens, he drops the narrative until a new article is written somewhere about how people like Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerburg bought a home in New Zealand or Hawaii, at which point he brings the idea back.

The story he's responding to today is from the Washington Examiner. It's a story that you see over and over through the years when the world seems chaotic. Around Y2K, conspiracy theorists made these sorts of claims (as did Alex), after 9/11 they said the same (as did Alex), around the supposed 2012 Mayan Apocalypse, you saw many of the same articles about "boutique survival bunker companies."

It's a human interest story meant to appeal to the paranoia that everyone is already feeling. The article conveniently doesn't name any of the elites that are supposedly buying up space in this guy's survival camp, Fortitude Ranch, though he claims people from "unnamed three letter organizations" are flocking to him. What this amounts to, because it's devoid of any real information, is a buzz-marketing puff piece for Fortitude Ranch.

Dr. Group drops by to talk about how the World Health Organization is warning about the possibility of a breakout of Disease X, and how he has done a lot of research into this. Alex and Group are covering this news almost as if they are trying to say that this is a specific disease, but it is not.

Every year, the WHO puts out a list of the diseases they believe could pose the biggest risk to humanity. This year, they added an additional entry, Disease X, to symbolize all the potential health threats that are not on radar. It's basically the equivalent of a gambler hedging their bets by "playing the field." John-Arne Rottingen, chief executive of the Research Council of Norway and a scientific adviser to the WHO committee explains it thus:

"History tells us that it is likely the next big outbreak will be something we have not seen before. It may seem strange to be adding an 'X' but the point is to make sure we prepare and plan flexibly in terms of vaccines and diagnostic tests. We want to see 'plug and play' platforms developed which will work for any, or a wide number of diseases; systems that will allow us to create countermeasures at speed. "

That makes a lot of sense, but somehow Alex turns this into an argument to be anti-vaccinations because he believes that they are going to be the cause of a new, human made, mutated super disease. The reality is that scientists are most concerned about diseases that jump from animals to humans, as many such as Ebola have in the past:

"As the ecosystem and human habitats change there is always the risk of disease jumping from animals to humans. It's a natural process and it is vital that we are aware and prepare. It is probably the greatest risk. "

Beyond that, Dr. Group gets into a whole lot of pseudo-science about the pineal gland, and how the "Globalists" are trying to calcify it so humans can't use their third eye. He makes the claim that the only thing that can help with this is iodine, and what a coincidence, they sell "the only real pure" iodine on the market (Even if you believe any of this is based on science, all the new age websites say that turmeric is the way to heal the pineal gland, not iodine).

Earlier in the day, police announced that their suspect in the Austin bombings had been killed in a stand-off with police. Alex reports the existence of a blog that is suspected to have been the bomber's, but at this point, I can find no evidence that the blog has been online since the time it purports to be (there is nothing in the Wayback Machine before March 2018, all of the comments are from March 21, 2018, etc). It could be real, and if it is, it is evidence that the bomber had conservative beliefs, but at the point of this writing, I do not deem it to be credible evidence.

The last troubling thing that happened on today's show was that Alex responded to an article about some of his comments about South Africa, and how it should have "been like Wakanda" if not for the influence of colonists. It is fair to say that Alex's comments were stupid, but also slightly taken out of context by the article. What is substantially larger of a problem is his response, in which he says this:

First of all, the clip he's referring to is a clip of is of South African Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, and in the clip, he actually specifically says he was "not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now." Take the end of that sentence how you will, he specifically says he's not calling for killing of whites.

More importantly, this is an unbelievably telling sentence from Alex. The fact that he is saying that "whites are being exterminated in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, you name it" tells me that he identifies with Rhodesia being a thing when in reality, it is the name of an internationally unrecognized state that hasn't existed since 1979.

Rhodesia is literally a symbol of the white supremacist, white nationalist movement. You may remember Dylann Roof wearing an apartheid South African and Rhodesian flag in pictures. It is not for no reason.

Rhodesia broke away from its existing status as a part of the United Kingdom in 1965 because the UK would not recognize their apartheid government, where the 3-4% white population controlled the entire apparatus of control. Wars with black liberation groups broke out, and the regime employed incredibly horrific means to stay in power, including torture and rampant incarceration of black leaders. In 1979, the government collapsed, but the racist myth of the white supremacist state of Rhodesia remains to this day. The fact that Alex Jones so casually throws in a reference to it in the context of his fake narratives about white genocide should tell anyone all they need to know, namely that Alex Jones has deeply ingrained white supremacist beliefs.

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

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:

• • 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.
  • Since that point, Giffords has been very active in pushing for gun control measures, for pretty understandable reasons.
  • 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.