Seeing as how the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is this Friday, and JFK’s assassination represents the primary conspiracy theory in American history, one would think this is going to be a big week for Mr. Alex Jones, ostensibly the primary conspiracy theorist of our day. If you’ve never heard of Jones, I’m not entirely sure where to send you to start, but there are a couple of different ideas we can pursue in this post: his YouTube Channel has over 14K videos, so you may need a few minutes to get through that. Rolling Stone did a nice long-form feature on him back in 2011, while The Atlantic Wire is discussing him today. (That latter piece is based partially off this interview in New York.) On InfoWars, a site Jones is affiliated with, there’s a list of 33 conspiracy theories that ended up being true; Jones didn’t write that post, but his picture appears about six different times on the page, so we can make the jump there, I think.
Some believe he’s in the business of selling fear, some have likened him to Hitler, and a few believe he’s legitimately dangerous to the public democratic process. Here’s one of his most notable mainstream media appearances — an all-corners-covered rant on Piers Morgan Live this past winter:
That one blew up social media for close to 24 hours.
Here’s his take on Jared Loughner and the Tucson shooting of Gabby Giffords:
There are many ties between Jones’ work (Loose Change and Zeitgeist, the latter of which is connected in some ways to Terrorstorm) and Loughner.
Here’s Jones on Sandy Hook:
Jones absolutely loves — loves — to denote major violent events as ‘false flag operations.’
Here’s Jones on the Oklahoma City bombing:
Essentially, he believes it was an ‘inside job’ involving the FBI.
The video associated with Jones with the single-highest view count on YouTube is this one, entitled Fall of the Republic.
Here’s a takedown of said movie, to balance it out a bit.
Now I’ll throw two semi-meaningless cents in here: I do believe that, over the course of human history, governments and big orgs and companies have covered things up, yes. I do believe that sometimes, governments do that for the safety of their citizens, and sometimes, they probably do it because they fucked up pretty badly and don’t want people to lose trust in the process (which again, ties back to safety of citizens). To say that large-scale death situations involving Americans were perpetuated by the government, though … that’s a lot. If it happened once or twice throughout human history, sure — for example, that last 9/11 plane might have been shot down, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but there was a greater need there, i.e. it was supposedly headed for the White House — but to claim everything is a government operation of some kind is a little bit much. I don’t think the government would kill kids in Connecticut to prove some broader point, especially 10-11 days before Christmas. Or hell, maybe this is the real truth:
https://twitter.com/MaxTFortune/status/400916169453879296
One of the beauties of America is that you can believe what you want; I believe some shit here and there that’s completely ludicrous to others too, I’m sure. Alex Jones has a platform and deserves that platform. Debate about it should be welcome and encouraged. Do I think everything is a false flag? No. But there are others that do, because if there weren’t, would Jones be a millionaire? Likely not. Ideas that make sense to certain people rise to the top if those people are willing to consume them. Oh, and via Google bombs, which is a fun lil’ Alex Jones technique.
Let the man talk. You don’t have to believe it, and if something is insanely crazy, get on the ‘Net and debate it (his channels are fairly open, from InfoWars to his YouTube comments stream). Here’s one to exit on for this post — a BBC meltdown involving ‘Nazi scandals, Lockheed scandals’ and more:
