Today, Dan and Jordan dip back into the past to take in a rare treat. In this installment, Alex invites Ann Coulter onto the show hoping to humiliate her with his debate skills and superior grasp on "the truth." This does not go well. Citations
It's an examination of this Japanese high school class that gets unmoored in space and time, right?
And so allowing that to happen, you get a wonderful mix of like Lord of the Flies examination of the dawn of civilization and society's growth and how shit falls apart along with...
Yeah, I mean, it was just basically like a strawberry watermelon kind of thing, but it was very tasty, and I don't remember the name of the brand, so, hey.
Coming up later in the show, I have one of the chief neocons coming on the broadcast, one of the big spin doctors, one of the co-opters of the conservative movement in this country.
In fact, if you tune in to talk radio, whether it's a local show or a national show, they're all telling you that...
Well, Bush is okay.
Yeah, he wants your guns, but go ahead and turn them in.
It's the conservative thing to do.
Well, the Patriot Act doesn't take any of your rights.
Those lying liberals, you know, they're trying to tell you bad stories.
Well, I'm not a liberal, folks, and I've read both Patriot Acts, and they're so horrible.
That it staggers the mind that they would put this type of stuff on paper.
Well, the big one, yeah, according to the Red Alert and the Washington Post and the Gazette News Service out of New Jersey, they've said we're, quote, enemies and we leave our homes.
Our children will be taken to undisclosed locations.
And I have the Associated Press as early as 99, it's in the takeover, where they say FEMA was running this plan.
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I know.
So we can't trust them.
We can't open up the school year.
Now, you know, if you want to open up the revolution, that would be a good way to do it, is to not go along with the next school year.
That would open up a whole panacea of questions and investigations.
Well, there's already, it's gone from 1 million five years ago to 2 million a year ago to 3 million kids homeschooling this year, this last school year.
And the way it's growing, the exodus, they are panicking.
So they're only going to do a giant terrorist attack when kids are in school, and therefore the way to stop this from happening is to never go back to school.
Yeah, and I like that Alex's response to that seems to be like, yeah, yeah.
So the way to stop the big one from coming is not have the kids in school, and that's why homeschooling is so popular, and that's why they're attacking the institution of homeschooling, because they need to have those kids in school for when the giant terrorist attack does happen.
What kind of a day did the globalists have where they were like, oh, no, we were going to do it when all the kids were in school, but we took too long.
And he can't be talking about the Rebuilding America's Defense document, the PNAC document, as it's often called, because the date is off.
He's saying it's in 1998.
What Alex is talking about is not a white paper, and the more you hear him use that term, the more you need to ask yourself if he even knows what that means.
This was a 1998 open letter that the Project for the New American Century sent to then-President Clinton, urging him to pursue regime change in Iraq.
The letter begins, quote, In your upcoming State of the Union address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat.
We urge you to seize that opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the United States and our friends and allies around the world.
That strategy should aim above all at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power.
Agree with it or not, that statement absolutely doesn't seem like it's coming from folks who are saying that Saddam doesn't pose a threat.
A couple months after that letter was sent, the group followed up with another letter to Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House, and Trent Lott, the then-Senate Majority Leader.
The letter was basically them reporting that they tried to get Clinton to work on getting Saddam out of power, but he wasn't biting.
They reiterated that it was their belief that policies of containment that had been in place regarding Saddam weren't working, and that if left unchecked, he posed a very severe threat, perhaps the worst since the Cold War.
These are the letters that were written in 1998 that were seen as being indicative of a longstanding desire on the part of the members of the Bush administration to topple Saddam's government.
It's either the case that Alex is just making up things about these documents or he has such a shaky grasp on what they say that he thinks that they're saying that Saddam isn't a threat and that it's just an opportunity for resources.
And wrote the white papers saying that they knew that Saddam wasn't a threat and they just wanted resources to make a base, which is not what that letter says.
Jason, you've got a system set up in America where the individual is protected above the interest of the state or any criminal crime rings that set themselves up.
That didn't mean, though, that all the protections there were enforced or directed to the Indians or blacks in this country.
And it's up to blacks and Indians and any other human being to stand up and demand their God-given rights that the Ninth and Tenth Amendment and others only point out.
No one can take your liberties and freedoms, but certainly what happened to the American Indians was wrong to the Native Americans.
That is a cute view of history, but it's so detached from reality that I can't really believe that this is an expression of, like, idealism or naivete.
The idea that no one can take your rights is so dumb that it barely has meaning in the real world.
If U.S. history teaches us one thing it's that you can totally have your rights deprived from you.
You may still have those rights in an abstract sense like you deserve those rights but in terms of actual concrete reality if the U.S. says you can't vote you don't have the right to vote.
The angle that Alex is taking seems like a cop-out, but that has nothing to do with the absurdity of this position that he's like, well, maybe the rights, the protection of rights weren't enforced or directed to Native Americans or black Americans.
What does it mean to not have protection of rights directed at you?
It feels like it means you don't have those rights.
When you say that the protection or the enforcement of rights weren't directed at these people, it seems like you're just trying really hard to not say that the U.S. had laws on the books depriving people of specific rights based on their race or gender.
The stupidest part of this clip is that Alex is pretending that he thinks that groups like Native Americans and black Americans needed to stand up and demand their God-given rights.
That's dumb, because the way he's saying that, you'd really have to think that he would be right there on their side, supporting campaigns for equal rights for all Americans.
He has stated his opposition to the Civil Rights Act in the past, because among other things, he feels that requiring businesses to serve people of all races could be a violation of their right of free association.
Further, his heroes and intellectual traditions that his worldview grows out of, they fought tooth and nail against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
His favorite author, Gary Allen, wrote the book Communist Revolution in the Streets, portraying the calls by black Americans for equal rights as the result of a nefarious communist conspiracy.
Alex doesn't believe any of the things he's saying to this caller, he just knows that believing otherwise is...
The other stuff, like the belief in the Patriot Act and neoconservativism and all this stuff, that's the stuff that she really believes, but then she tricks you into liking her, but with her support of McCarthy.
So at this point in 2003, Ann Coulter had just released her book titled Treason!
Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
Around this time, Coulter was at the peak of her powers as a media troll who would just say inflammatory things and then get people mad at her to facilitate a cycle of attention.
It worked really well back then, far more so than now.
The book Treason was in a large part about how Coulter felt that McCarthyism was something that was created by the liberals' imagination and that McCarthy was in fact right and did a great job of rounding up communist spies.
And the Venona intercepts do definitely back this up.
Right.
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There definitely was some indication that there were a few people within government who were cooperative with the Soviet Union and providing them with information.
That is a fair assessment of the Venona intercepts.
But to say that they go so far as to.
No, no.
Though a lot of the fervor around anti-communist witch hunts in that period, they're associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, McCarthy himself presided over the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he used to grandstand against alleged communists.
The transcripts of his hearings between 1953 and 1954 are all available, and they don't paint a great picture of the man.
These transcripts probably weren't available to Ann Coulter at the time of the writing of the book, though, since they were only made public in January 2003, and this book was probably...
That being said, even before 2003, there was plenty of public information that would lead someone to assess McCarthy as being an idiot and a piece of shit.
It's fun to imagine he was just trying to find out the communist spies in the government, but you have to recognize he was also doing stuff like the following.
Quote, The State Department's International Information Agency operated several overseas libraries that were freely available to citizens in host countries.
McCarthy declared them to be Soviet tools because there were books in the libraries authored by communists and their, quote, fellow travelers.
He harassed the libraries so fiercely as communist propagating tools that some of the libraries actually burned the books written by authors McCarthy deemed to be subversive.
So we've gotten into McCarthy a bit in the past, so I don't want to go too far down that road again, but I was just really interested when I heard Alex say that he was wanting to give Ann Coulter some kind of a McCarthy purity test.
Seeing that she defended him based on the Venona intercepts just kind of led down a weird road of looking into this and seeing like, oh, this does actually, it does back up some stuff, you know, like there were Soviet...
Looking into Ann Coulter and her arguments in favor of McCarthy are the first time that they have ever come up in any of the discussion of things on this show.
It's about the 50-year history of treachery of the Democratic Party, of the Democratic Party becoming a refuge for traitors, for Soviet spies in the 50s.
And on to defeat in Vietnam, losing confidence to communism, being completely wrong through eight years of Reagan, and now back to their old tricks again in the war on terrorism.
Okay, because a lot of the White House calls themselves neocons, and that's their own word.
And Bush says he'll re-sign the assault weapons ban and add some nice little tidbits to it.
Bush has voted with Hillary and others for open borders.
Hillary voted with Bush for the war, so I don't know if it's just a Republican-Democrat issue.
I mean, how do you respond to that, that Bush, I mean, we see the biggest growth in the federal government ever, and a lot of different things developing.
How do you respond to that?
Could conservatives do more to shine the spotlight on the dirt in our own house?
I think it's up to conservatives to fight these issues by persuading their fellow countrymen that we don't want big socialism, supported by Teddy Kennedy and Hillary.
And not just sit back and say, oh, Bush should be stopping all of this.
Bush is the president, as president and a Republican.
He has the whole mainstream media against him.
I think Ronald Reagan did this as well.
The president can really only focus, it seems to me, on about three issues.
And I think the issues Bush has chosen are the war on terrorism, taxes, and the judiciary.
But you can't re-persuade an entire nation to stop voting for benefits for them.
So, I mean, it's mildly confrontational, but I think this is a little spicier than you'd expect pretty quick.
I'm liking that.
Ann's comment that the president can only really do three things, that's kind of telling.
If she's trying to make excuses for Bush by saying he shouldn't be judged except for based on the three issues he's decided to focus on, shouldn't she have the same latitude for any politician?
Anne's biggest issue could be, let's say, reducing regulation, but that wasn't one of the three issues that Obama decided to focus on, so shouldn't she have the same kind of what-can-you-do attitude towards it?
This is a pretty transparent dodging of the question.
I'm pretty glad that Alex just didn't let it stand.
You know, like, I don't know.
This is a cop-out.
Of course, Alex's objection to her answer isn't going to be anything close to where I'm coming from, but at least he's not giving up on it entirely.
You know, there is something to be said for, like, hold on a second.
Listen, when you elect somebody to run a several trillion dollar enterprise per year called the American government, What you want to make sure they can only do is focus on three out of the ten million possible things going on at any given point.
Your administration, if you're good at delegating things, can have other priorities that you're working towards.
Let's say your State Department is invested in X, Y, and Z. Sure.
Your Department of the Interior is doing all this stuff.
Your Education Department's doing these things.
There is a lot that the president could delegate.
but yeah I guess I wouldn't say they can only focus on three things but in terms of what you can publicly really make awareness towards you know maybe three maybe four you know there is a limit
amount of time that a president has uh true to advocate publicly for things and i do think that she makes a fine point that it is up to you know the conservative folk in america just to convince their fellow voters uh to go along with this true like whatever they think is the the The platform that people should be going towards.
He's above the left-right paradigm, and above the left-right paradigm, you don't have to worry about all the reality that the left-right paradigm deals with.
But I'm saying instead of sitting back and complaining that Bush isn't doing everything for us, I think we have to understand that there's only so much the president of the United States can do.
The first thing you see is that Alex can't define what he means by open borders in any sensible way.
Granting amnesty to a certain amount of people who are already here is not the equivalent of opening the borders.
The only other thing he could even come up with was that Bush supported the Pan-American Union.
None of this amounts to open borders, and I think that Alex is going to need to define what he means by Pan American Union, because that definitely has existed for a long time.
In 1889, the first international conference of the American states was held in D.C. This was, quote, for the purpose of discussing and recommending for adoption to their respective governments some plan of arbitration for the settlement of disagreements and disputes that may hereafter arise between them and for considering questions relating to the improvement of business intercourse and means of direct communication between said countries and to encourage such reciprocal commercial relations as will be beneficial to...
Yeah, that guy was a real dick.
which would go on to be named the Pan American Union, which then became the Organization of American States.
Alex isn't worried about a Pan American Union.
He's just worried that Bush is going to let more non-white people into the country.
But even so, he has a terrible grasp on being able to defend what is a really strong accusation, and that is that Bush supports open borders.
So he quickly pivots to the assault weapons ban.
Alex doesn't even really have good information to go on here.
All he can throw out is that the NRA put out an alert that they think Bush is going to ban assault weapons, and that's really weak.
It's interesting how Anne concedes the point, because I think she gets the sense that it's not even worth arguing.
So she retreats to the very reasonable point that a president can only do so much and has to consider getting re-elected.
I think here we can see a fundamental difference in how someone like Anne Coulter and someone like Alex Jones understands power and leadership.
For someone like Anne, being the president is part of a process.
You're picking up where your predecessor left off, and you're going to leave the next president the circumstances that your term ends in.
You can do a lot, but ultimately you can't alienate the voters who determine whether you'll stay in office.
You have to make concessions and recognize that imperfect compromises might need to be struck.
Someone like Alex doesn't view leaders that way.
He really does ascribe to a strongman dictator mold in terms of people he likes and would want to be in charge.
People who would come in with a set agenda that caters to Alex's social and political preferences and then put in place whatever, whether or not most people wanted it.
We saw this play out with Trump, and even back at this point, his supporter Ron Paul has a lot of similarities.
Because he's never been president, we don't know if he'd actually follow through with it, but Alex has every reason to think that the day Ron Paul got into office, he'd unilaterally withdraw us from the UN, he'd get rid of pretty much every social welfare program, shut down OSHA, and eliminate all foreign aid.
Alex has this fantasy of what Ron Paul would do, and thankfully for him, we never had to test the theory of whether or not he would do it.
And, on the other hand, has had experiences in the actual political world.
And she's had politicians she's supported become president.
Because she's very close to the actual workings of politics and doesn't have the same delusional idealism that Alex had in 2003 and still had about Trump, although he's threatening that if Trump disappoints him 20 more times, then it's going to be over.
Alex would never agree with it, but I think Anne is fairly right in accusing Alex of insisting that Bush do everything for him.
In the past, I wouldn't have looked at it this way, necessarily, because in many ways, Alex is doing something that could be described as politically active, the way that Anne's like, get out there and do something.
He's doing a radio show.
He's advocating for his political beliefs, which is in line with what Anne is suggesting people do.
But Anne's point is there, too, because Alex's show is basically just complaining about how Bush isn't doing everything that he wants him to do.
There's a passing of the buck in Alex's politics because he believes that things get done by strong, singular leaders, as opposed to the result of collective action, miscellaneous financial interests, and sometimes coincidences.
Bush signing the assault weapons ban, which he didn't do, wouldn't be the result of a ton of influences like millions of people electing members of Congress who would pass legislation for Bush to sign in the first place, or special interest groups lobbying for or against the bill.
It would just be a matter of Bush doing this to us because he's bad.
If Bush were good, then the millions of voters, or the majorities in Congress, or the lobbying groups, they wouldn't matter.
He would just do whatever Alex believed was right, even if doing so meant causing ridiculous political conflicts and possibly torpedoing his own career.
It's enticing to think of Alex's habit of looking at his favorite politicians as an all-powerful daddy like it started with Trump, but I don't know.
I think that feature is probably there a little bit consistently.
That's a function, really, of his same show, though.
In his efforts with his show, he is consistently telling his audience, you don't have to do anything.
You give me the money so I can do stuff.
So, in essence, his political ideology is, well, I'm not the politician, so my job is to support whomever for them to do it for me in the same way that my listeners give me money so I can do bullshit.
So it seems like an almost one-to-one explanation for how he thinks everything operates.
And there also seems to be, like, I guess the idea would be To use the political organizing of Alex's show, like there's enough listeners, and if they vote, we can vote for the person who will do everything we want them to do.
I was going to say that what he just told her is that you're our token intelligent woman, and obviously when we do have power, if it's consolidated, you will not be involved.
Alex has just asked this one question of, if Bush is so great, why'd he do this thing over and over again?
And Anne has made her answer totally clear.
And even, she's been fairly polite with Alex being kind of a dick, calling her a mascot because she's an intelligent conservative woman.
Again, I hate Ann Coulter, but in conversation with Alex, she comes off like less of an asshole interpersonally and more of a person who actually knows how to convey her point.
I want to talk for a second about UNESCO, though.
The organization was founded in 1946, and the United States was a founding member.
In 1984, during the Reagan administration, the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO, and it's historically a fairly open question about whether or not that was an appropriate decision.
There were some complaints of mismanagement by the then Director General, so it might not have been a totally frivolous decision.
But either way, in 1995, we'd seen a change in leadership at UNESCO and a renewed interest in rejoining.
President Clinton indicated that he wanted to rejoin at this point, but he was limited in his ability to do so by budgetary constraints.
As he left office, he requested that Bush rejoin, which he did in late 2003.
It's true that Bush was inclined to rejoin, but he honestly couldn't have done it on his own unilaterally.
In order to join, funding had to be appropriated, which was done by an act of Congress.
It wasn't the act of one person because the action needed to be, you know, the action needed other things to make it happen.
Anyway, one of my big points here is that Bush signing on to UNESCO isn't some kind of a single event that happened entirely motivated by Bush himself.
It's a piece of a larger picture that Alex just doesn't handle.
I understand why you're saying that, but just in the interest of total fairness, the arguments at that point in the 80s for getting out were more sensible than a lot of other decisions.
Well, I think somebody needs to, because all I hear is worship of Bush, and we're going to have a real conservative country and get back to what America is and influential people like you and others.
Hatred Act 2 has secret arrest of citizens for no reason, liability protection to police and military to act domestically.
I mean, this is stuff Bill Clinton tried to get past in his omnibus crime bill and failed.
Section 213 means they can break in your house without a warrant, take whatever they want, plant whatever they want in any criminal investigation, even if it's non-terrorism.
So you can say that, well, you haven't read it, but then you've been looking for the problems in it.
It is really fun, though, when she clarifies that she hadn't read what he's talking about and also doesn't care.
We've talked about this a bit in the past, but there was no Patriot Act 2. The bill that Alex is referring to as Patriot Act 2 didn't pass.
Also, there's no Section 501 in S22, the Senate bill.
The first section is 1101, so this citation that he's throwing out just isn't good.
I understand that this was a proposed bill, and it wasn't cool, and it was a bit scary, but it's really counterproductive for Alex to embellish shit about it in order to take a shortcut to getting the audience invested.
It didn't pass.
It doesn't allow the stuff Alex is claiming it does.
And by this point in July, it's been six months since any action had been taken on the bill.
It was introduced and it was sent to committee.
It's essentially a dead bill at this point in July.
In all due respect, Ann, I can't help but drawing this analogy.
Oftentimes I go into a place of business and I inquire about purchasing something, so I go to a clerk or a salesperson, and I walk away in disparagement because I oftentimes know more than they do.
And that seems to be the case here with Alex versus you.
And I think you give the liberals powerful cannon fodder by it not being a conservative issue to demand that Bush not violate the Bill of Rights or Constitution, or Bill Clinton, or anybody else.
Like, supporting the war, not being concerned about possible rights violations, and what have you.
Now, I'll grant that I don't believe Alex's principle is actually sincere here.
There are plenty of instances of potentially rights-violating things that Trump proposed or even put into place by executive order, and Alex had no problem with them.
Even as someone I don't fully trust the sincerity of, I still find his position here more palatable and responsible than...
Although I just, I think the way that Alex is interacting with this, like, she's on the phone, another person's on the phone, and the two of them are teaming up against the guest, I think is probably poor form.
Just that, that, fuck, it was, it's like a sports talk show.
That's what it's really sounding like, is somebody calling into the goddamn strength coach for the Philadelphia Eagles and being like, why didn't you run the 45 at the, yeah, it's that bullshit.
See, you even fell for the sleight of hand that Alex did there.
So the problem with this conversation and how it's been carried out is very clear here.
These two people are talking about things so imprecisely that a pretty decent argument can be made that they're both right and they're also both correct in saying the other is wrong.
Up to this point, the discussion has been about the Patriot Act and Patriot Act 2, and it's centered entirely around the notion of the infringement of American citizens' rights.
So when Anne asks for an example of that, it's fair to assume that she's looking for an example of a citizen of the United States.
And even she's clear in her question that she's talking about the violation of civil rights.
Alex follows this up by saying that U.S. citizens were taken to Camp X-Ray, which continues the theme of discussing U.S. citizens.
He then jumps to torture at Bagram Internment Facility, which really complicates things, because now the conversation is incoherent.
Anne has every reason to think that they're still talking about U.S. citizens and their rights possibly being violated, so she's absolutely correct that the U.S. didn't torture any U.S. citizens to death at Bagram.
Simultaneously, Alex is so used to jumping all over the place and not staying on topic that he probably doesn't even realize that...
He's now shifted over to talking about non-US citizens in a discussion about civil rights.
And he's correct.
In December 2002, our soldiers killed two citizens of Afghanistan at Bagram, and they had been tortured.
Both Alex and Anne will probably leave the exchange thinking the other is completely insane and wrong, and Alex will take this as proof that she's a liar who rejects proven reality.
But it's actually just a case of people not being precise with what they're talking about, and ultimately, in this specific exchange, Alex is far more guilty of making this conversation nonsensical.
It's hard to tell if that's a debate strategy or if his mind just doesn't have the normal guardrails that most people have, but either way, the result is the same.
Also, Camp X-Ray is a part of Guantanamo Bay.
A man named Yasser Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan and declared an enemy combatant.
He was raised in Saudi Arabia, but he was born in Louisiana, so the government claimed that when they held him in Camp X-Ray, they didn't know that he was a U.S. citizen.
Once it was known that he was a citizen, he was sent to a jail in the United States.
According to findings in a Supreme Court opinion from his case against Donald Rumsfeld, he was taken to Guantanamo in January 2002, and it became clear that he was a citizen in April 2002, and he was sent to Norfolk, Virginia.
According to the information that they have, they didn't know he was a citizen.
They did find out they did not allow him to be held at Camp X-Ray.
It's just not relevant to the point Alex is trying to make.
I would say I'm opposed to people being taken to Guantanamo, US citizen or not, and that I don't think that this case in any way indicates a desire on the part of our government to put US citizens in camps or establish that precedent.
I think it's all nonsensical.
I think the argument they're having...
Right.
The point here is that because Anne and Alex have such incompatible communication styles, it's almost impossible for them to actually have a conversation that means anything.
No, and I understand that that is an important thing for a conversation that is trying to go somewhere, is to maintain a, like, if we're talking about U.S. citizens, then we can only have a point if we're both talking about the same thing.
But, yeah, it's just interesting to me to see the path that this goes and how from an external perspective, really looking at it, you can see, all right, here's where this is going off track.
And neither of them really recognize, like, the other one, except Anne kind of does a little bit later.
Yeah.
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At this point in the conversation, they just are butting heads about completely...
No, I think it's horrible that they're huffing depleted uranium, and I think it's horrible they got hit by VX and sarin, according to hundreds of publications in universities, University of Texas at Dallas.
And I think it's horrible they weren't given treatment for that.
I do support the troops, yes.
I think the anthrax shot was very dangerous, and they finally suspended it.
I mean, yeah, I do support the troops.
But I don't let people say, do you support the troops?
Well, you've got to support what I say, or you don't support them.
So what you see here is such a great example of how Alex can't answer any questions or dig deeper into any of these narratives and talking points, even at this point in his career, even in 2003.
Anne has asked him for an example of someone who had their rights violated because of the Patriot Act, and he's incapable of coming up with a single example.
Whether or not there are people who fit that description, if Alex can't come up with something that defends his claim, he's lost the point in terms of the conversation and has no reason to take seriously his claim.
No one has ever really challenged him on this point before, especially on the show, so Alex is unprepared to do anything other than what he always does on the show, which is to bounce all over the place.
The conversation of civil rights swings to the use of torture against foreign combatants, and once Anne realizes that this switch has happened, she tries to get back on track and remind Alex that they're talking about U.S. citizen civil rights.
Alex tries to bring up various country citizens being designated as enemy combatants, which, again, agree with it or not, Anne has a perfectly sensible response to in that...
You know, aiding the enemy is a wartime crime.
My point is not about which side here I agree with.
It's about who's actually making coherent sense and trying to stick to the point, and that person is undoubtedly Ann Coulter.
The use of torture against foreign combatants is disgusting and should never be acceptable, but it doesn't intersect with the civil rights concerns that Alex is bringing up, so it's really irrelevant to the conversation.
Citizens of other countries being designated enemy combatants also doesn't really have anything to do with the point, but the notion that U.S. citizens are being taken to Camp X-Ray is partially relevant.
There's only one example that Alex could possibly have about this, which is Yasser Hamdi, who at this point had already been transferred to a U.S. prison once it was known he was a citizen.
At this point, the only other citizen who had been declared an enemy combatant was Jose Padilla, who was sentenced for planning to manufacture a radiological bomb and held at a military prison in South Carolina.
Both of these instances are interesting and a concern to civil liberties organizations, but neither of them were made possible by the Patriot Act.
This really has much more to do with the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was signed on September 18, 2001, which itself was highly reliant on a 1942 Supreme Court ruling, Ex parte Quirin, a case regarding the use of military tribunals for eight captured German saboteurs.
Instead of dealing with some of these subtleties, Alex just points a finger at the Patriot Act, because that's something that's easy to hang your hat on.
It's a good shorthand, and being opposed to it gives him some kind of a credibility in this left- and right-wing civil libertarian liberties community.
Strictly speaking, though, Anne is still right.
And if Alex wants to take issue with the designation of people as enemy combatants, that essentially requires a fundamental opposition to the way that the U.S. military operates.
Alex doesn't want to deal with that, so instead he jumps to another one of his preloaded talking points about what it means to support the troops.
Anne wasn't talking about supporting the troops or not.
That's a false point that Alex is responding to because he has that pre-scripted rant about how he's the one who supports the troops, and by throwing that out, he can pretend to have some kind of a moral high ground.
This is an incredibly pointless conversation they're having, and Alex is losing.
Whatever goes on at the Grove, the sources that Alex is citing don't back up his claim that gay sex workers are carted in to work for the group members.
There's no women around, and articles like the ones Alex references do discuss the vague homoeroticism that hangs in the air, including but not limited to men playing women very lewdly in stage performances and the audience hooting and hollering.
The stories that Alex is referencing do discuss prostitution, but the story doesn't match what he's saying.
Essentially, there is a nearby city to the Bohemian Grove called Monte Rio, and there's a bar there that was notorious for being a place where Bohemian Club members could slip away at night to order a sex worker.
According to a 1975 book by G. William Demoff, this is what the group members referred to as river jumping.
This Washington Times article that Alex is referring to is from 1989, and it doesn't actually have to do with Bohemian Grove at all.
It has to do with the fear that the Soviet Union was using male sex workers to ensnare politicians.
Not great.
Quote, we have known for many, many years that there is a department of the KGB whose job it is to prey on sexual deviance, said retired Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Because closet homosexuals in government service can easily be turned through blackmail for espionage purposes, General Graham said, quote, we have always in intelligence tried very hard not to be giving classified information to known homosexuals.
In 2004, which is after this episode was recorded, Prison Planet reposted a New York Post article about how there was a former gay porn star named Chad Savage who worked as a valet at the Grove, which is meant to imply that I guess he was secretly also a sex worker for the powerful man there.
This is a bit of a leap, and definitely not substantiated by the reporting.
The Grove spokesperson Sam Singer said, quote, the club doesn't care about his past.
It's totally possible that he was someone who worked in the service industry and also in porno.
It's not like sex work always pays everyone's bills.
People also sometimes have to have a second revenue stream.
Anyway, I can find no evidence of the claim that Alex is making, so Anne might be able to win $10,000 here if she takes Alex up on it.
And interestingly, if you do try to find claims of gay prostitutes being taken into Bohemian Grove, so many of the sources just link back to Alex.
John in Tennessee, you're on the air with Ann Coulter.
Go ahead.
unidentified
Yes.
Isn't the title of your new book a propaganda attempt to divert attention from the treason of Prescott Bush's criminal convictions for arming Adolf Hitler during World War II to divert attention from Sir Bush Jr.'s connection to the assassination of Ronald Reagan and Rand Contra.
So, I kind of feel like Anne is handling this pretty well, and I would definitely listen to a show where Alex and Anne were forced to take calls together.
Prescott Bush was not criminally convicted, like this caller is saying, and like Alex is saying.
He was on the board of a couple of companies that did business with a man named Fritz Thyssen, who was an industrialist in Germany and had been a member of the Nazi party.
Doing business with Thyssen was totally not illegal until the end of 1941 when the U.S. entered World War II, since we were technically neutral up to that point.
In 1942, the assets of these companies were seized, and by that point, Thyssen had had a falling out with Hitler and was no longer a supporter of the Nazi party.
In fact, Thyssen had supported the rise of Hitler and the Nazis financially and materially, but had a strong break in 1939 when Germany decided to invade Poland.
In 1940, some of his private letters were published in Life magazine.
From the article, quote, In publishing the papers leading to my break with Adolf Hitler, I wish to show that the German nation, which elected Hitler its leader because of his professed opposition to communism, is innocent in the developments that turn national socialism into its opposite.
In his letters, he was pretty clearly opposed to the mistreatment of Jewish Germans.
Quote, on November 9th, 1938, the Jews were robbed and tortured in the most cowardly and most brutal manner, and their synagogues destroyed all over Germany, I protested once more.
As an outward expression of my repugnance, I resigned my position of state counselor.
All my protests obtained no reply and no remedy.
Essentially, it's a pretty messy situation.
Materially, this guy, and by extension, the U.S. folks like Prescott Bush, who did business with him, had a direct impact in the rise of the Nazi party.
At the same time, looking at their precise actions and what they did, it's kind of different than if you were to look at Sure, sure.
All these people have a certain amount of historical blame, but it's not always totally cut and dry.
And make no mistake, I'm not saying that Thiessen or Bush had great intentions.
They would have been happy to create an oppressive corporate state where labor rights were non-existent.
All of these characters suck in their own ways, but Alex has to call Bush a Nazi for this, because he can't unpack things to recognize that the real motivating factor for his involvement with Thiessen was...
Their shared opposition to communism, which Alex agrees with.
If he has to unpack this and talk about Thason's history, which only opens Alex up to having to discuss how the political machine he'd supported to defeat communism grew out of control into outright fascism.
The irony of a woman who is coming on this show to sell me a book about how great McCarthy was is now telling other people this is the nuttiest thing she's ever heard.
It is way less nutty to call Prescott Bush a Nazi than it is to say McCarthy was a good guy.
You are, hey, you are a neocon, and you're out there shelling for the Trojan horse.
That is George Bush, who's a gun grabber, UN promoter, open borders.
I mean, the evidence, you know, the fruits on the tree, Ann, and we've been trying to be nice to you, and you've just denied things that are all over the mainstream news, many of them for 50 years, and you can't face up to the corruption of the Republican Party that's growing the size of the government.
Why is, according to the International Herald Tribune, why does the Justice Department have their people standing over witnesses in the 911 investigation and, quote, intimidating them?
Well, it's like the USS Liberty, which they now admit we've had Admiral Moore on, former chairman John Cheese's staff, he admits the government tried to sink the ship to blame it on Egypt.
So, it's just a going back and forth of people, and Ann Coulter gets to act like she's laughing at all of this shit, because it sounds more openly lunatic than what she's selling you, which is the same lunacy wrapped up in better words.
Ann Colter, we really appreciate you coming on the show, and we hope you'll talk more about the neocons, gun-grabbing, open borders, and blocking Dan Burton's committee, and signing on to UNESCO, and signing campaign finance reform, restricting the First Amendment.
I think that Ann Coulter doesn't give a shit about who he is, so it might not matter, but this kind of behavior would definitely be like, if she cared, she has access to all sorts of very famous people that could be guests on Alex's show, and now will not be.