Posts Tagged → alex jones
Why I do not have a podcast, and won’t
Couple years ago, a longtime older friend, financially successful and politically active, asked me why I do not have a podcast.
“I see all these podcasts online, and I think, Wow, Josh would be great at that You should do it.”
And to me, even though I am not going to be a podcaster or have a podcast, what a great and appreciated compliment that is, for several reasons.
The most important being that discerning thinkers — people who more carefully consider the information they consume — are increasingly tied into podcasts. Both Left and Right, and a lot of Americans in the middle, are hungry for information that breaks from the worn out, politically partisan, and openly fraudulent mainstream legacy media outlets like the New York Times, ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-NPR-BBC, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.
These mainstream legacy media organizations are not fair-minded arbiters of accurate information. Rather, they are highly tuned political activism outlets. And it is no “conspiracy theory” to say this; they proudly flaunt their partisanship every single day. At this point, there is no material, substantive difference between the New York Times and Mother Jones magazine, other than the NYT is living off the fumes of its once great reputation and the closed circuit dopamine high that leftists live in (“I only read information sources that align with my values” said an old friend to me several years ago, deliberately not self-aware about how self-defeating such a non-diverse, mono-syllabic approach to information is to those people, especially, who pretend to consume only the very best and purest of information).
The NYT masquerades as a serious place, whereas Mother Jones has been a gleeful juvenile bomb thrower for decades. Both are far-left America-hating Marxist activism proponents who abuse their masochistic audiences.
And yes, I have the hands-on experience with both of these outfits to speak authoritatively about them. Suffice it to say that we all have a family…
And so, in this general vacuum/absence of accurate news i.e. mainstream media’s deliberate misinformation fake news, podcasts have opened up huge opportunities for people genuinely interested in learning the actual factual truth. And market demand has been met by market supply; podcasts are now such a thing that plenty of Americans run for office or commit public displays of strangeness, just to get enough of a following to launch a podcast.
Today, there are an awful lot of podcasts available. It seems like every would-have-been college professor and wingnut and ex-CIA officer and ex-combat veteran with loads of ink on his arms has started a podcast. A podcast is what serious would-be “influencers” do. The actual “influencers” just seem to post brief TikTok videos of themselves in various stages of undress, or eating messy sandwiches in an expensive car while wearing expensive clothes.
I would say most of the podcasters on the right are pretty careful thinkers, not all, but most. People who kind of defined conservative podcastistan for a long time (long by podcast terms), like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, have largely discredited themselves by abandoning facts and rigorous thinking for nonsense only slightly better packaged than the trash at the New York Times or Mother Jones.
This is the beauty of the podcast world today: Dip your toe in the water and check it out. Jump in for a swim and lap up all the many flavors of individual opinions you like. It is a much richer, more diverse, more interesting, more informative place than all of the monosyllabic legacy media outlets put together.
So given my positive view of podcasts in general, why did I not start a podcast of my own? Several simple reasons: I do not have the time to do it; I am not narcissistic enough; though I am a very strong public speaker, I enjoy writing much more than talking; and I do not know how to do the necessary selfie videos, which feel socially awkward to me.
Too many podcasters really scramble to stay on top of the wave, every day, which can lead to some humorously foolish, or sophomorically high schoolean, dis-believable grasping at straws. Publicly. Which I am old enough and old school enough to feel self-conscious about. So, no thanks. This blog is a satisfying enough outlet for me. And I am not in the information “business” or in this for money, i.e. note the absence of advertising on this website.
I write because I feel compelled to write. It is an undeniable energy that wells up inside me all the time, and it is part of the reason I had at one time aspired to be an academic. If you do a search of “Josh First Harrisburg” outside of Google (which is not an honest broker about accurate information, but rather has made itself highly politicized with inaccurate search results), you will find dozens and dozens of essays and articles I have written over the past 25 years, as well as news reports and interviews on my various land projects and on some of the political races I have run in.
What emerges from that resulting morass of printer’s ink, I think, is the clear image of a guy who has strong opinions about a lot of subjects, who enjoys public speaking and writing, and who has several feet in several different worlds simultaneously.
And I am most happy limiting that all to writing one or two essays a week in my blog here, which fits in with my busy work schedule. No podcast necessary. No podcast desired.
But I will give credit to the conservative podcastistanians, whose overall grand number, high volume, interesting topics, and really wide intellectual diversity shows us just how important the First Amendment is, even as the legacy media try to hog that all to themselves, and to discredit and take it away from anyone who does not march in lockstep with their leftist narrative.
I recommend that anyone with an ounce of interest in starting a podcast do so. Explore it. Be your best self. And if you fail, that is OK. At least you will have checked it off your list. Take comfort from knowing that I will not be able to do that, because I am just too lazy.
Tucker Carlson, dingbat mean girl
The past two years of Tucker Carlson’s life have been devoted to attacking Israel and everyone who supports it, as well as revisiting essential Adolf Hitler messaging, like “the Jews” control media, banking, government etc. One of the pro-Israel groups, AIPAC, is one of his special whipping boys. Tucker accuses AIPAC of forcing American politicians to “obey” and thus AIPAC “controls” American government. He says.
Tucker ignores the truly vast amounts of money spent lobbying and influencing American government and decision makers at all levels by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and many others who are definitely not American allies. AIPAC’s pipsqueak budget doesn’t compare, but if you are looking for a scapegoat, nothing beats “the Jews.”
Another thing Tucker has repeatedly said is that Iran is not America’s enemy (even though it very much has been since 1979), Iran is only Israel’s enemy, and that any real war against Iran’s nuclear bomb program, by either Israel or America, will automatically result in WORLD WAR THREE.
In this way, Tucker became the chief Iran First advocate in America. Given his open, unhidden, unapologetic personal animosity towards Jews and Israel, Tucker probably supports a nuclear-armed Iran as some sort of counter-balance to Israel’s longterm survival, and thus the survival of the Jewish people, if not an outright threat with a high likelihood of succeeding in turning Israel into smoking rubble.
But the problem is, if you are Iran First, like Tucker is, then you are America Last, and yet Tucker claims to be a MAGA America First guy. He cannot have it both ways. Iran’s record of hostility towards its “Great Satan” America runs the gamut from holding 66 American hostages for 444 days, to multitudes of bombings that have killed Americans around the world, to holding weekly rallies declaring “Death to America” in Iran and in countries it has exercised control over, like Syria and Lebanon. Iranian leaders have said countless times that its nuclear bomb program is intended to destroy both Israel and America. Iran has openly bragged about having terrorist sleeper cells here in America.
And yet, Tucker has done all one person can to protect Iran from military intervention by its likely victims. He really is Iran First, and so it logically follows that Tucker is okay seeing American cities go up in mushroom clouds if he also gets to see Israel destroyed. And while Tucker harbored anti Jewish sentiments in the past (e.g. his initial FOX News report on Sam Bankman Fried’s felonious Ponzi scheme dripped with personal animosity towards Jews), it was given rocket fuel by huge payments from both Iranian businessman Omeed Malik and Qatar. Reportedly over ten million dollars.
Yes, the same Qatar that has been funding the destruction of American college education in the pursuit of destroying American culture and borders.
So, Tucker may have been a kind of mean girl in the past, but his dislike for Jews and Israel really took off after he left FOX News. Left to himself and his anti-Western, Islamo-supremacist financiers, Tucker’s anti-Jew stuff ballooned into an open movement, a greater-good willingness to sacrifice America on the old Adolf Hitler altar that also destroyed Germany.
To this neo-isolationist banner Tucker attracted a whole posse of fellow MAGA conservatives, like open Jew hater Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Jack Posobiec, Patrick Bet David, even Charlie Kirk, who I thought would have had the common sense and honest Christian charity to stay away, and a whole bunch more. Some of these people have embraced Jew hatred as a business, and honestly, they seem to be doing OK at it.
Led by Tucker Carlson, this posse of mean girls has subsequently greatly shaped the public debate, the internal MAGA debate, and President Donald Trump administration’s policies about Israel, Iran, and American foreign policy in general. To intervene or not, to get regime change or not, to support an underdog ally, or not.
My opinion is that Tucker’s posse of mean girls has elevated non-interventionism and neo-isolationism into a graven image, an idol to be worshiped at any cost. Really guys, no regime change in Iran now, when probably 80% of the Iranian people want it? When we can most easily achieve it? You have a solid argument for this? I don’t see it.
Imagine being so “pro freedom” that you violently argue for ninety million Iranians to remain under the jackboot of the evil Shia mullahs. Because regime change is supposedly always bad. Again, I don’t see the logic or sound reasoning of this argument by the posse of mean girls. The blood of this week’s Iranian victims, civilians right now being rounded up by IRGC soldiers, is on your hands.
For the record, I have been MAGA since 2015, when Citizen Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy. Max campaign donations (even still on a monthly basis), all of the MAGA/ Trump tee shirts, boxer shorts, socks, hats, signs, banners, memes, you name it, I paid top retail to show my support for the one person I believe can save America. This blog is a record of my absolute commitment to President Trump at every turn over the past ten years. His America First policies are everything I believe in.
And for the record, I was a huge Tucker Carlson devotee when he was at FOX News, because he asked all the right questions about the right things, policies, and people. His goal was freedom and his aim was true. Tucker’s unintentionally comedic WASPy hostility towards Jews at the end of his Sam Bankman Fried report was tolerable, because who the hell doesn’t dislike Leftist Jews? They are a pox on America, as are most Leftist Catholics, Leftist Protestants, Leftist Muslims, Quakers et al.
Yes, Leftist Jews should know better than anyone else about how evil Leftism is, because of all that the Jewish People have been through, especially at the hands of arch Leftists. But Tucker has made it openly clear, most recently in his interview with US Senator Cruz (where Tucker revealed that he is a deliberately fake Christian), that he maintains an animosity for all Jews, including the politically and culturally conservative ones who are devoted to America and Western Civilization. The same people a politically active conservative would normally share the political trenches with.
World War Three never happened after the apocalyptic genocidal death cult running Iran was brought to heel, and America and Israel successfully defended Western Civilization together without America losing one military person or citizen. And thus is Tucker revealed as a destructive dingbat, and not a serious thought leader about real policy issues.
