Madness

There's a rumor in Crazyland that Alex Jones is actually the late comic Bill Hicks. Not true, of course: Although a certain facial similarity does exist, the two men have very different ear shapes. Also, Hicks was modest and well-read -- and he knew a lot about the JFK assassination, while Alex simply pretends to. Yet I have to admit: Little Alex can be a lot funnier, as the above video demonstrates.

It is hard to believe that this man is advising the president. Not only that: I would say that Alex Jones -- more than any other individual, with the possible exception of Steve Bannon -- created this madness.

“If she is Jewish, she should go back to her country,” a 13-year-old Trump supporter said of a protester.

“This is America, we don’t want Sharia Law,” one attendee explained. “Christian country,” he added.

One man insisted that Senator John McCain was a “secret communist.”

“I think there’s a lot there,” he said of Pizzagate, a deranged right-wing conspiracy theory that Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was running a child prostitution ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. “Definitely enough to warrant an investigation.”

The day’s proceedings would grow uglier still.

“I just want to let them know that I can’t wait for the liberal genocide to begin,” an Oath Keeper shouted at a small group of protesters.

“That’s the way to make America great again,” he later told Cohen. “Liberals are destroying the country.”

Elsewhere: I'm not sure that we should make too much of this, but it appears that Wikileaks is now hosted in Russia. Of course, so is my own email service (a situation I really ought to change one of these days).

The site at the other end of that link is iffy. They traffic in Alex Jonesian nonsense about those awful, awful "globalists," which is the new code-word for "international bankers," which was itself an update of "cosmopolitans," which was Stalin's favorite euphemism for Jews. Given the iffiness factor, I'd be grateful to any reader who can confirm this allegation.

Along the same lines, I just learned about this oddity, which apparently was first brought to the world's attention by Rachel Maddow:

Finally: Here's a taste of what to expect from the forthcoming House investigations.

I'm not terribly hopeful about these inquiries; I can recall how the CIA deep-sixed the HSCA and other hearings. Cross your fingers and press members of the Select Committee to dig deep. You may also want to contact Dutch Ruppersberger, even though he's no longer on the intelligence committee. He is -- literally -- the NSA's congressperson. On most issues, he has a good, liberal voting record, and I'm told by people who have met him that he's a genuinely nice guy.