this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Does he have a military background or something? Why is he more of an expert on this topic?
He is intentionally vague in his videos, but he has worked with the military in some capacity as a civilian before, and he still has a lot of contacts in the military. Mostly though, I personally trust him more than most because I've been watching him for years and he usually turns out to be correct. He's also pretty level headed and willing to admit what he doesn't know.
I've not done a deep dive into his background, since he's clearly been in journalism for a long time with the choice of tangents he goes off on and presumed questions he addresses. I needed only one video to know he was becoming part of my daily news diet. If he does not have a military background in some way, I would be surprised.
I think he said he was a contractor for army but didn't go into any more details. He was also in prison for smuggling immigrants across border if I recall correctly.
His real name is Justin King, and his background is... checkered at best. His politics on screen are solid but he also has prior convictions for human trafficking. These are things you can look up. So I take everything around him with a grain of salt.
So I googled around, and found this conviction: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/February/08_crm_145.html
This isn't usually what we think of as "human trafficking." It seems that the people he smuggled understood what they were doing, and not being forced or coerced it. If that were the case, additional charges of exploitation would have been filed.
This is what like 99.9% of human trafficking is. They’ve successfully propagandized anyone who conflates sex trafficking with normal undocumented human movement.
This is what I was referring to, thank you for finding it.
An important distinction here is that he was convicted for the visa fraud kind of trafficking and not like sex trafficking or something. There's a huge difference there but people hear trafficking and just assume it's the worst kind imaginable.
I appreciate the background. I've worked with a lot of journalists with checkered pasts and am one myself, so that sort of thing doesn't bother me so long as he's good at predicting the things he can based on experience and data and is clear when he can't. That his politics align somewhat closely with mine makes it easier to watch, but I'm there for the analysis.