Mon:There Was a Copier in the Room w/ Classified Documents

Alex Jones Doesn't Just Play a Nasty Person.  He Is One in Real Life.

Former staffers at Alex Jones' Infowars show are speaking out, describing a turbulent and sometimes violent work environment at the infamous conspiracy theorist's network, Insider reported.

Robert Jacobson, who first started working for Jones in 2004, described one incident where he was accosted by Jones after he apparently added the wrong advertisement to a product that was being marketed on the show. According to Jacobson, Jones got in his face over the matter and yelled, "You're not going to ruin me, Jacobson. You're not going to ruin me!" while being restrained by other staffers.

Jacobson later testified against Jones during his first Sandy Hook damages trial. Insider's report comes as Jones media empire reels from a $1.4 billion judgment from lawsuits filed by the Sandy Hook families.

Another former staffer, Josh Owens, says Jones would get heavily intoxicated and would badger and intimidate staffers. If staffers questioned Jones, it would send him into a rage where he'd "pound his chest," destroy office equipment, and sometimes even physically hurt people.

Inside Infowars' crumbling empire: Ex-Staffers reveal the 'volatile' and 'unhinged' atmosphere working for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

Sticker Shock at the Gas Pump?  Blame Previous Guy.

In his first big post-federal indictment speech, Donald Trump made some very odd points before a Georgia audience. Speaking in a convention center with barely the capacity of a high school gymnasium, Trump spent much of his time in the way that many expected: Calling special counsel Jack Smith “deranged,” attacking the Department of Justice as a “sick nest of people who need to be cleaned out,” and blaming his indictment on President Joe Biden. As with most such events, Trump devoted the bulk of his appearance to his favorite subject: the hardships of being billionaire cult leader Donald Trump.

Trump got into other topics, like threatening the audience with World War III. But the most bizarre pitch of the evening may have been when he talked about how he got onto a “three-way call” with Vladimir Putin and “the king of Saudi Arabia” (it was actually the bone-saw-wielding usurper Mohammed bin Salman), to talk about oil production. Because Trump outright said that he didn’t do this to get the Russian dictator or the Saudi monarch to raise production and keep prices low. He called on them to cut production and drive up oil prices.

“I had to save the oil companies,” said Trump in his Georgia speech. “They were all going to go bust.” So Trump got his authoritarian super team together to squash global production of oil—and absolutely guaranteed that Americans would be paying at the pump. Then Trump and Republicans followed up with their next act—blaming Biden for high gas prices.

But at his speech in Georgia, Trump blamed Biden for something else. He blamed him for bringing gas prices down.

No sooner had Biden taken office than Republicans began to capitalize on the increasing numbers at the pump to insist that Biden was responsible for lower oil production, although this was explicitly the result of Trump’s deal. They put out deliberately misleading charts that moved around the dates of when Trump had taken office and when he had left, to make it seem like high oil prices were a Democratic policy. Trump and others began routinely lying about the price of oil when he left office and the price Americans paid at the pump.

But the real cause for the increase was never hidden.

The New York Times reported on the results of Trump’s actions back in April 2020 and how Trump managed to cut global production by 9.7 million barrels a day. As USA Today reported at the time:

President Donald Trump’s decision to negotiate with oil producing nations to cut production by nearly 10 million barrels a day is not only unprecedented, it also is the opposite of what prior presidents have done.
While others had tried to lower prices and increase availability, Trump was trying to raise prices for everyone and cut the availability of oil.

News of Trump’s direct intervention in the market—one of those things that conservatives like to rail against when a Democrat is involved—temporarily boosted prices by 24% in one day. But, as CNN Business reported soon after, Trump’s victory lap was premature. Despite getting his buddies to sign on to his idea, oil prices crashed to an 18-year-low within days of the deal being made.

For a Change We Can Really Blame Canada

Overdue rains and cooler temperatures have given Quebec fire crews a chance to launch their assault on dozens of wildfires, but the reprieve for one part of Canada comes as fires in the west of the country have once again forced residents to flee their homes.

The country has been struggling with an “unprecedented” wildfire season, with nearly 450 forest fires across the country on Sunday, 220 of which were burning out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

In Quebec, crews are hoping to attack dozens of blazes that have been temporarily weakened by favourable weather.

“We went from a reactive mode to an offensive mode,” Quebec’s forestry minister, Maïté Blanchette Vézina, said in a weekend news conference.

But more than 14,000 residents remain under evacuation as the mix of domestic and foreign firefighters and Canadian armed forces members tackle the blazes.

The 117 wildfires across Quebec underscore the record-breaking nature of the spring fire season that has displaced tens of thousands and choked the air of more than 100 million people in eastern North America. Quebec wildfires have already scorched 740,000 hectares of boreal forest, more than 300 times the average during the spring season over the past decade.

In the coming days, nearly 350 firefighters from the EU will join nearly 1,000 personnel already on the front lines. Nearly 100 firefighters from Spain and 140 from Portugal will arrive in Quebec City on Wednesday.

“There is this solidarity,” Claire Kowalewski, the European Union Emergency Response Coordination Centre’s liaison officer, told the Canadian Press. “Today, unfortunately, it’s Canada that is facing these terrible fires. But last year in Spain, it was also a terrible year.”

Despite progress in Quebec, officials in western Canada have watched as new blazes crop up and move dangerously close to populated areas.

The Alberta town of Edson was evacuated Friday for the second time this year after a nearby fire crossed fireguards and moved perilously close to the community.