Today, Dan and Jordan tune in to hear Alex go really overboard trying to drum up fear of Russia starting a thermonuclear war, only to have one of his guests ruin all the fun. Plus, Alex finds a fitting representative to speak about the Ottawa protests, and Ted Anderson drops by, but he's not selling gold. Citations
Yeah, thankfully I've never had a car while I've lived here, so I've never had to suffer this, but I've been around a number of people that fate has befallen them, and yeah, it's bad news.
I appreciate one thing about that drop more than any other, which is, Dan, you have broken both mine and every other policy wonk's brain because I cannot get away from take a little break.
So yeah, there were some comments that Putin made after his press conference, or I guess it was in the press conference after his meeting with Emmanuel Macron recently.
And there was some talk of moving some missiles and what have you.
This may be interpreted as a direct threat of nuclear war and escalation, but, you know, either way, it's not great, but I think Alex might be a little bit buckwild on this.
It's important to understand any kind of threat that Russia may be making vis-a-vis discussing their nuclear capabilities in the context of political history, because Putin and his administration do this often.
In 2014, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threatened nuclear action against Ukraine if they tried to take back Crimea.
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In 2007, they warned Poland and the Czech Republic that they could still nuke them, even with Western anti-missile defenses, attempting to dissuade the countries from letting the U.S. put these defense systems in their country to begin with.
It's one of the very few pieces of leverage that Putin and Russia actually have at their disposal to use.
And because of that, it's become a state policy to use threats of nuclear war in order to de-escalate situations that couldn't be de-escalated otherwise.
So, Putin came into power in 2000, and shortly after that, that April, he put in place a new military doctrine which replaced many key parts of the previous doctrine that had been put in in 1993.
One of the main pieces that's relevant to us now is that in the original version, nuclear arms could only be used in cases of a threat to the existence of the Russian Federation.
The new version expanded this to allow for their use in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation.
The former head of Poland's National Security Bureau, Stanislav Kozhe, explained how this works in practice in an article from Politico Europe.
Quote, the numerous events of Russian nuclear blackmailing add up to the Russian strategy of information warfare, which aims to intimidate the West and enable Russia to reconstruct its sphere of influence in ex-Soviet Uniswap.
Yeah, many folks who speak on the matter view this as a propaganda tactic, because ultimately this nuclear deterrence also exists within the nuclear deterrence that many NATO countries also have.
And Russia knows that if they were to actually use those nukes that they're posturing like they're going to, the response would be swift and devastating for all parties.
Their ultimate goal of protecting the Russian Federation from NATO influence wouldn't be served by the Russian Federation getting nuked, but the goal can be served by threatening to use nukes and banking on that threat being enough to intimidate and change the behaviors of NATO and the countries in the region that wish to join it.
This is a really serious situation and things are tense, but it's important to recognize how little Alex engages with any of this shit.
Putin has said that he's gonna move some missiles.
Perhaps.
And Alex starts his show doing this grotesque movie trailer voice about thermonuclear war.
When you recognize that the threats that Putin is deploying are part of his information warfare strategy, then you have to realize that all Alex is doing is either wittingly or unwittingly amplifying and playing right into that strategy.
The more this threat is hyped, the greater the chance of forcing a NATO de-escalation and capitulation to Putin's demands.
Then again, the world is completely insane in 2022, and many things that would have been seen by conventional wisdom in the past 20 years as being impossible, I don't know if that holds true anymore.
So I don't want to entirely downplay this situation.
The point I want to make is just that if Alex were half the geopolitical expert he pretends to be, he wouldn't engage with this piece of news this way.
When I saw this quote this morning in the Daily Mail, I had trouble believing it.
So I went and searched some of the quotes and found it nowhere else in the Western news.
So then our crew spent some time and found it in Russian, and we checked it and had it translated, and indeed we found a version that has subtitles, where Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has threatened nuclear war.
And said, within the blinking of an eye, he says, you won't have time to blink your eye.
If NATO continues its Article 5 takeover, I've got the quotes right here on the video, of Ukraine and this proxy war, we're going to basically stop you.
So Alex is trying to pretend that he did all this legwork, and the crew dug up and found intel about this Putin speech that isn't in this Daily Mail article he read, but spoiler alert, that's all bullshit.
Eventually, Alex plays this translation that they supposedly came up with, and it's just literally the video that's embedded in the Daily Mail article.
He's pretending that he did a ton of work on this story because he wants to create the impression that he has access to information that the rest of the world and the media doesn't have access to or they're choosing not to talk about.
So in reality, you can really easily find an English translation of this entire speech that Putin gave on the Kremlin's website.
And Alex's version is just the Daily Mail version.
And it doesn't really match the claims even that he's making.
So the message that Alex wants to send is that Putin was saying that if Ukraine joins NATO, you won't have time to blink your eye because there's going to be nukes shot off.
That isn't really accurate to the transcript provided by the Kremlin.
There is a reference to something happening speedily.
In this case, in the heartbeat instead of a blink.
But it's not necessarily about nukes.
It's about how if Ukraine goes into NATO...
and Russia attacks Crimea, which they interpret as defending Crimea, because Russia views it as their own, then "in a heartbeat, all of the NATO countries would be drawn into a war with Russia because of the rules of Article 5, which state that if one country is attacked in the group, everyone comes to their defense." There are slight differences, but these are the fingerprints of a lack of exploration
That Alex did on the topic, that he seems to want to, like, he wants to make it look like he's taking this very seriously and did a lot of digging into it, and he's missing, like, the actual contours and context of what is being talked about.
Plenty of other outlets are running with the same lead as him.
And more importantly, he didn't put a single unit of effort into this reporting, since it's just him riffing on a Daily Mail article while pretending that he and his team scoured the internet for raw footage of the speech and translated it.
So all of his people finally find it in Russian, and they translate it, and they dig even deeper, and they find a video that has subtitles, and it happens to be the same video that's in the Daily Mail article.
Alex plays it and then reads the subtitles over it.
And there are some very slight differences between this and the Kremlin transcript that I want to discuss, because I think it does actually change some of the meaning.
So this part in the Daily Mail video matches the Kremlin transcript pretty closely.
Where theirs is, quote, I want to reiterate, I've said this before, and I would really like you to hear me this time and convey this message to your readers, viewers, and internet users.
There's a prior context that's missing, however, because this is just where the Daily Mail video begins, and Alex has no idea of what happened right before this.
The question that Putin is answering is, quote, is Mr. Macron your only dialogue partner in Europe?
You said he was a good conversationalist.
Do you consider him as an intermediary to convey your message to Europeans?
That if Ukraine joins NATO and attempts to bring Crimea back by military means, the European countries will be automatically pulled into a war in conflict with Russia.
If Ukraine joins NATO, Russia is not going to respect Ukraine's claim to Crimea, which will lead to conflict.
And because Ukraine will be then a member of NATO, all the other NATO countries will have to defend them, which puts them immediately into conflict with Russia.
This is important to understand in the context of the question because it has to do with the message that he's hoping to send to these leaders of European countries that would be affected by this and sucked into them.
war conflict.
It's essentially an attempt to blackmail the European countries to not support Ukraine joining NATO because if they do, the question of Crimea will become their problem, and Putin is signaling in advance that he's not going to budge on it.
So this is a subtle hint towards the threatening of using nukes, but it's not really a direct threat.
This is Putin expressing that he's well aware that NATO's combined military strength outweighs his, but he has a nuclear deterrent, so pure military strength isn't the only determining factor here.
This doesn't read to me to be a strong threat to use a nuke, because you have to remember the context.
This is about Crimea and the dominoes that will fall if Ukraine joins NATO and Russia doesn't give up their claim to the area.
This will lead to war, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to lead to a nuclear war, because that would kind of be counterproductive towards settling what's essentially a regional territorial dispute.
I'm not saying that it couldn't spiral out of control, but what would they do?
But, like, the same rhetoric was flying around in the advance of the 2008 war with Georgia and the 2014 hostilities in Crimea.
And even though there was active war happening, there weren't nukes used because that weaponry didn't match the goal of these conflicts.
These comments that he's making kind of read the same way.
It's not so much, or at least to me they do, it's not so much that he's saying he's going to nuke anyone over the conflict, but that the rest of the world shouldn't get involved because you wouldn't want to be at war with a nuclear power.
So now we reach the point where Alex just starts freestyling his own doomsday narratives.
Apparently somewhere in this transcript that he's translated, there's information that Putin has embedded suicide agents with suitcase nukes all over Europe.
I don't know about you, but leaving aside the important point that I don't believe any of that, how can Alex possibly ever think that someone who would have sleeper suicide suitcase nuke agents all over foreign countries could be anything less than a fucking supervillain?
How can Alex honestly think that Putin is some kind of force for good bringing back the West if he's also creating elaborate, high-tech situations like this that would essentially allow him to hold the entire world hostage?
Again, like you said, like a fucking Bond villain.
So here's where there's a slight difference in the translation, and I think in this context, the Daily Mail one seems less accurate, and it's on Alex's reading.
So in the Daily Mail one, Putin says, quote, you won't even have time to blink your eye when you execute Article 5, whereas the transcript from the Kremlin says, quote, you will be fulfilling Article 5 in a heartbeat even before you know it.
more sense that Putin would be saying that if Ukraine joins NATO these European countries would have to invoke Article 5 and come to Ukraine's aid involving Crimea in a heartbeat.
Right.
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That conflict exists and it isn't going away so if Ukraine is involved in a collective alliance of mutual protection the second they governments will have to enact Article 5. Right.
He didn't say that Macron had been, quote, been tormenting me for six hours now with his questions, guarantees, and solutions.
The Daily Mail translation actually had torturing instead of tormenting.
This is where Alex's understanding of Putin's comments begins and ends, because all he has to go on is that Daily Mail video, and that's where the video cuts off.
Immediately after this clip ends, Putin said of Macron's diplomatic visit, Quote, I believe his is a lofty mission, and I am grateful to him for his efforts.
For our part, we will do our best to find compromises that suit everyone.
There's not a single point that we consider unachievable in the proposals we sent to NATO and Washington.
So this seems like somebody who has, you know, at least...
Rhetorically, an interest in keeping negotiations open.
So this isn't accurate based on the actual press conference that Putin gave, nor is it even accurate to the Daily Mail video that Alex is using as his source.
And there's two really critical things that I need to talk about.
The first is that Alex doesn't seem to even understand conceptually what he's talking about.
The way he's talking about Article 5 shows that he thinks that it's something that NATO can invoke to absorb Ukraine into the group, but that is not correct at all.
Article 5 states, quote, The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
and consequently they agree that if such an armed attack occurs each of them in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by article 51 of the charter of the united nations will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith individually and in concert with other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
It's the rule that an attack on one member state is an attack on all member states, not a mechanism by which NATO can absorb countries into itself like it's the blob.
This was a part of NATO's core cause, and it's been in place since 1949, but it was never invoked until 9-11, which should tell you this is not a universal thing that happens all the time.
The fact that Alex doesn't seem to grasp this conceptually, like what Article 5 is, really makes it difficult to trust that he has any understanding of the conversation that Putin was having, or the story that he's covering.
And that leads me to my second point.
This is a serious story, one that involves the safety and security of a ton of people in Ukraine and Russia in particular, but it could have ramifications for people outside the region as well.
According to Alex himself, this is a story that has potential consequences in the neighborhood of a worldwide thermonuclear war, and he can't be bothered to know the basics of what he's talking about.
This dynamic is something that's at the center of a lot of Alex's content.
Intense and terrifying sensationalization of a headline he skimmed and decided not to look into.
And when it's around this kind of subject that is conceivably very serious, I am not convinced that this is going to lead to nuclear war, but Alex seems to be.
That's the way he's presenting the story, and he can't even get himself to care past his normal routine of finding a headline, lying about what he's done to prepare the story, and then riffing about his own paranoid and terrifying fantasies.
Now let me break down the timetable on this, if this starts.
When the Russians get overwhelmed by the NATO forces arrayed against them and all the heavy weapons and high-tech weapons, Putin is saying that they're going to use tactical nuclear weapons in theater.
Against those forces.
That'll happen within about 10 minutes.
At that point, the orders will go out, and cruise missiles all over Europe, hypersonic, will be fired at Russian military bases.
Once the Russians make the decision to use tacticals, they'll have all their submarines surfacing, their cruise missiles ready, their ICBMs ready, and the minute they detect with their radar and satellites, He goes on to,
Suitcase nukes, you can conceivably say that it's easier to get a single person with a nuclear device and a suitcase around than having a fucking nuclear submarine off the coast of New York City.
But as Alex is discussing this, like, maybe we all deserve to die from nukes, he starts rambling around, and man, he drops a bomb of his own that's a little bit unbelievable.
The CIA, through Georgetown University, literally has sicked an army.
Of over 10,000 Muslims that they brought in over the last few decades, run through the school and given degrees, and have intelligence badges enter after us.
This is really dumb, but we've done this narrative already.
It was a year and a half ago, but instead of a brigade of Muslims, it was Antifa and MS-13 that had lists of all the patriots, and we're going to go door-to-door taking them out.
That didn't happen, and now I guess enough time has passed that Alex can be sure that his audience has forgotten that he said that shit, so he's trying it again, both a brigade of 10,000 Muslims.
I mean, if you've got a secret army, part of the reason that you have it, or part of the best part of having a secret army is you can keep it small, you know?
Capitol Police examine background social media feeds of some who meet with lawmakers.
You read the article, it says, yeah, they also get in plain clothes and spy on people.
But now the documents are coming out, being released by Congress, and the investigation of the Inspector General, inspecting themselves, of the Capitol Police.
And when you read what's in this, it's unbelievable.
They went into members of Congress' offices at night, like the plumbers, like Nixon did, having G. Gordon Liddy and others break into the psychiatrist.
of the Democrat candidate to find out about him for dirt.
Not right, not good.
Nixon had to leave office.
This is a tough narrative for Alex to be dipping into, because in that clip there, within one minute, he's essentially gotten into trouble with two of his friends.
Roger worked for Nixon and swears that Watergate didn't go down like that, so he and Alex might have to have some words based on Alex's reporting.
Then, Alex is describing what these folks in the Capitol Police allegedly did, going into offices dressed up like maintenance people to spy, and that's exactly what James O 'Keefe got arrested for doing to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu.
It's really wild how many friends Alex has who do the precise evil shit he's so mad at his enemies for supposedly doing.
So as for this Politico article, it's a disturbing revelation that the Capitol Police have been doing some digging into the social media and other public information that's available for people who meet with members of Congress.
and I'm not into it, but Alex is lying about what this article covers.
There's nothing in the article about spying in plain clothes.
That's just Alex adding to the recipe for, uh, had more.
Also, it's Alex referring to allegations made by Representative Troy Neils, who claimed that the Capitol Police were caught snooping in his office.
The Capitol Police released a statement saying that no one was snooping, but someone did enter his office to secure it because he left his office door open when nobody was in it.
When that happens, it's protocol for the Capitol Police to secure the office and close the door for him because it's not safe.
Also, Alex can't possibly have read the Inspector General's report that he's claiming to have on the Capitol Police looking at folks' social media investigation, because that just began this week, and there's no info that's come out about it yet.
He may be confusing with the IG report about the Capitol Police regarding January 6th, but I'm also sure he didn't read that.
He's either a neo-Nazi, or I guess if you want to be as generous as possible, he's an idiot who seems to be drawn like a moth to the flame towards any false piece of information that makes Nazis look good.
There's an issue of semantics I guess we could get into, but I'm flabbergasted.
So there's plenty more interviews of him palling around with white nationalist folks like the hosts of Red Ice TV.
He's doing interviews about how the protocols of the elders of Zion are actually real with the anti-Semitic dude who was also on InfoWars, G. Michael Jones.
There's a ton of people that Alex could have chosen to come speak out about the truckers in Ottawa and give an update, and magically, somehow, this is the guy he finds.
So we're not going to listen to too much about this interview because I don't really care and I don't think he brings a lot to the table or any interesting information.
But there's this really funny thing that keeps happening.
And then Alex keeps saying this guy's special forces.
And he has to keep correcting him because he doesn't want to engage in stolen valor.
I want him to just spend some time on who he is, what he's done.
He was a sponsor of mine in 1997.
A year later, he started the GCN Radio Network because he was already financing a bunch of shows.
He already had a production thing producing his own shows.
We're very popular on AM, FM, and Shortwave.
And satellite, he said, why don't I just start a network?
When I got censored and kicked off my local radio station, he'd already set up his network a few years before and was getting it ready, and I was already doing another show on it every day.
And then about nine years ago, ten years ago, when the gold market was way down and Ted couldn't pay me anymore, I parted ways with Ted, but instead you can still carry my show and syndicate it to stations.
I'll syndicate myself.
Two-thirds of my stations are with us, and about 90-something are with him.
We're still friends, but he couldn't pay me anymore, so I had to go out and try to syndicate my show more and try to get money in.
Also, we've been over this at length, but their relationship wasn't like some good buddies just trying to help each other out.
Alex was a shameless gold salesman for large stretches of his career and mysteriously, he became less gung-ho about everyone desperately needed to buy gold in his more recent career.
It's crazy how quickly it went from gold will save your life and protect you from all diseases to zinc will save your life and protect you all from diseases.
He gets sued four years ago by the Sandy Hook Democrat lawyers.
And he had nothing to do with what I said on air or did.
And I was already off his network.
He was only a satellite provider.
But they don't care about that.
And now we know.
Now they want the network itself.
And people say, well, keep fighting.
Well, it takes money to fight them.
Plus, and Ted will have the floor here, but I just want to get this out now.
Ted has been running this network with 700 plus affiliates and over 100 shows on it, but with talk radio and the implosion in the media and the economy.
For a couple of years, it's been losing money, but because it's a pet project he started, and because he's got other companies he can advertise on it, he keeps it propped up, even though he's losing hundreds of thousands a year, and that number's going up.
Well, he can't defend a lawsuit against these people.
I'm not positive that Alex's shady business practices are going to salvage this case because I feel like...
You know, if they have an existing syndication agreement and then Ted can't afford to pay Alex and Alex says, why don't you just keep on doing it and not pay me?
That seems like the agreement is still in place.
Alex has just agreed to forego payment.
Honestly, that just means that Ted's making even more money off Alex's lies about the Sandy Oak families since he doesn't need to cut Alex in for a taste.
His network's gone from making millions and millions of dollars a year profit to losing money, but he keeps it up there and keeps it running with the board ops, the engineers, the insurance, and all the people.
And then they come to him.
And Ted hadn't even told me this for a while, but then he just said, you know what?
Screw this.
I'm not going to shut down.
Quite frankly, Ted was planning to slowly shut down GCN.
But because they're trying to shut him down and because they're trying to silence those other hosts, he was going to give them time.
If he had to down the road, I know, to move other places.
Now Ted's going to...
Try to make GCN bigger than ever and stronger than ever.
We're going to fight all the way through the end.
And so he's here with us today, ladies and gentlemen, to talk about that.
And I appreciate him holding while I was saying this, but I'm going to put this out on air right now.
Let's put the URLs up, please.
Ted's already spent $300,000 plus battling these people.
Now to go to trial and fight them, it's going to cost him a half million dollars.
He's already losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to fund this and keep it on air.
And he's risking them getting judgments on him, even though he's totally innocent.
If this happens, but he's an American, because of the First Amendment, he believes in it, he's going to do it.
They're going to promote this website, SaveGCN.com, which is actually just a redirect to a Give, Send, Go campaign.
Right.
The thing that's wild about it is Alex is like, he's going to put commercials on all of his shows on the GCN network for people to go to that website and support.
Yeah, but he was already doing sort of that when he was selling ad space and commercials on GCN.
He would have commercials for buying ads on GCN, which is basically like, that is give me money, but then you get something out of it.
I mean, I can understand these people being scammed by, like, religious people, you know, the gospel, the prosperity gospel people, because they don't have an actual business.
No, you can always just be like, oh, I'm giving it to God.
Not like I'm giving it to a failed businessman who lied.
Because Ted came to me and he said, you know, I need three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand dollars, depending on what happens to go through this trial and all this.
He says, you know, I'm already losing a lot of money.
Do you want to try to help me or what do you think I should do?
And I said, Ted, by all means, do not turn the network over to these people so they can take all these people off the air and do this.
And I wouldn't be too surprised if this wasn't a situation where the behind-the-scenes conversation was more like Ted being like, hey Alex, you fucking asshole, you got me into this trouble.
Like, you understand I'm on the hook for this because of you.
So anyway, this is just a bulletin expressing the awareness that there are terror threats that are growing out of the COVID denial community, the 2020 election fraud community, and some other communities that are largely driven by rampant online misinformation.
Well, Alex, There's a lot of posturing going on, especially by Putin in that particular statement.
He knows that the United States is not going to invade.
Biden has already said it's off the table.
There are going to be no troops coming into Ukraine.
When it's attacked, they're going to let it fall.
They're going to wring their hands.
They're going to do sanctions.
But I doubt if he's even going to be able to...
You know, stop the pipeline, the gas pipeline coming in from Russia because the Germans are wedded to it and there's simply no way to, you know, handle their future gas needs.
So Skousen comes in with a, whether or not his assessments are correct or anything, definitely comes in with a voice of authority because Alex has built him up as one of the best geopolitical experts.
And he comes in and just contradicts Alex across the board.
Alex spent like...
Ten minutes doing a bizarre fantasy about how quickly nukes will kill us all.
And then Skousen comes in and he's like, nah, it's not gonna happen.
And you really run a danger when you have guests that have been on for years and years and have a necessity for you to take them seriously and to take them as actual experts.
Because this isn't...
Just like some asshole saying that Putin's lying about this religiosity.
We're going to pick up seats in the House and we'll retain control of the Senate, but it won't be the complete slaughter that it would be if there were no vote fraud.
And, of course, they are going to make it very sophisticated and get prepared to make sure that we don't win the presidency again in 2024.
Let me throw this out, because I covered this Saturday and Sunday this weekend.
Aired large excerpts.
Thought the info we put out was spot on, like you said.
I gathered that they were doing a people's grand jury.
Just like you have the 198 ways the Pentagon talks about of civil disobedience, nonviolent revolution, as a way to put this on to then show grand juries and other bodies the blueprint for victory.
I think I saw some statements out of them.
Are you saying that you saw areas where it wasn't being clear or what's happening?
First of all, there is a logistical reality that Skousen recognizes that Alex doesn't, which I think is really funny.
But Skousen accidentally tipped the hand a little bit too much at the end there, which is you can't really do this in a grand jury because you don't have proof.
Did somebody hit him in the head with a pan like a cartoon and he just woke up one day and he was like, maybe I should tell people that they don't have proof.
I wrote about it in my nationally syndicated column in January of 2021.
And I said, Trump should become Speaker of the House and lead and open and lead the investigations, criminal investigations against Biden for everything he's about to do that we know will destroy this country.
And so I asked Trump whether he would be willing to be Speaker of the House.
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I put my foot on his neck again and said, Will you be willing to be Speaker of the House?
And one of the main reasons for this is that there are tons of jobs that the Speaker takes on from an administrative and party leadership position that...
I don't think the GOP would be interested in having Trump be in charge of.
Leaving alone the fact that Trump doesn't want that much work.
Also, these motherfuckers like Alex and Wayne, they can agitate all they want about how their leadership in Congress is weak and ineffective, but in the real world, the greatest gift they could give the Democrats is somehow throwing out Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and replacing them with some inept diplomatic lightweight who wouldn't be able to rally the caucus.
Someone who didn't have the ability to negotiate with various parts of the caucus and get everybody on the same page.
It just would not have worked.
And I don't think that people like Alex necessarily I care about that or recognize the importance of that and just think like, oh, get fucking Matt Gaetz in there and we'll run roughshod.
No, you will not.
You will have your party fracture because he can't get people to come on board.