Editorials & Other Articles

BeckyDem

(8,361 posts) Thu Jun 13, 2019, 04:10 PM Jun 2019

The Terrifying World Of Alex Jones

Infowars is more than just a way for Jones to get rich selling snake oil…

by Eli Massey & Nathan J. Robinson

If you are not a member of the Infowars viewership, the appeal of Alex Jones can seem somewhat mystifying. If you have not already fallen down his rabbit hole—if you do not believe in false flag attacks and fluoridation conspiracies and black helicopters—Jones can seem transparently ridiculous. He rants, he sweats, sometimes he takes his shirt off. He obsesses over stories that most of us do not—recent headlines on the Infowars site include “Illuminati Symbolism To Replace Christian Cross On Notre Dame Cathedral,” “Barack Obama Is About To Be Investigated For Treason,” and “Learn How Vaccines Use Fluoride And Glyphosate To Kill You.” His worldview is paranoid, incoherent, and terrifying. It’s tempting to treat him merely as a lunatic or a grifter—John Oliver, in his detailed examination of the Infowars empire, seemed to think of it mainly as a scheme to sell bogus nutritional supplements.

And yet: While almost everything you could say against Alex Jones is true—half of what he says is nonsense, he traffics in demented conspiracies, his online shop sells obvious snake oil (from “Brain Force” and “DNA Force” tablets to chocolate bone shakes to mysterious red pills called “The Real Red Pill Plus”)—it is not surprising that he has managed to find an audience. Jones is a skilled entertainer, who offers his viewers and listeners far more than just sham health tonics and bunker survival kits. They’re drawn to him for the same reason people are drawn to televangelists—he seems to have secrets, and answers, and offers you support in the never-ending war between the sinister forces of Them and the desperate, surviving Us.

Before he was kicked off YouTube and Facebook, Alex Jones was bringing in an audience of close to 1.5 million people. Nowadays, it’s apparently quite a bit less, though he can still draw a crowd: A recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, lasting well over 4 hours, topped 13 million views on YouTube. Watching Infowars, it’s not difficult to see why: Jones has a preacher’s charisma, and a gift for creating drama and working himself into a raging frenzy. As with Donald Trump, everything he says might be nonsense (on the Rogan show, he strongly defended his theory that interdimensional beings were controlling the government), but it is very difficult to stop watching him.

The monologues on Jones’ show are rambling and often make very little sense, but he is so confident, so alive and boiling over with emotion, so convinced that what he is saying is not only true but that he is the only one who sees things how they really are. It’s all in the delivery, the voice. (Interestingly, while most televised blowhards eventually publish a book, Jones has never done so, perhaps because his schtick is entirely dependent on his persona, and making an interdimensional political conspiracy seem plausible in print is more challenging.)

Perhaps it is best to expose you to a sample of an Alex Jones monologue, so you can see what he’s feeding his listeners. Here is Jones talking about the plague of “illegals” coming over the borders. Be sure to read it in his voice:

Let me just calmly lay out that if you just go to even mainstream statements by the current head of DHS and the former head of DHS Jeh Johnson and what’s happening and what our reporters have videotaped and witnessed and what’s happening across the United States and what’s being organized, the UN, funded by elements of our own government and stay behind groups put in power by Hillary and Obama, helped collapse Europe with the help of the EU, with over 10 million military-age men in the last seven years, where Europe is just wrecked. 80 plus percent less tourism, crime rates off the charts, just bedlam.

Thousands of cars burned per week, hundreds per night, mass stabbings, sex slavery. The third world in many areas is Hell and we’re in an existential threa—crisis here. And just as they ran the same operation with North Africans and Middle Easterners and others I guess Europe in the last seven or eight years, the exact same people are running an attempt with not one but two caravans of over 40,000. The government is saying 40,000. They were saying it was a thousand before and it was 50,000 so I don’t know. But they’re always a lot bigger than they say. And there’s caravans arriving every day of a hundred, 500, 200, 1,000, and Beto O’Rourke is there as a literal treasonous traitor organizing it and bragging that it’s happening. People are coming across not being tested for diseases, they’ve been caught smuggling children en masse.

This is insanity. Total insanity. But it’s designed to bring the country down. And you’ve got that backdrop with the deep state trying to overthrow Trump. All Trump is doing is the basic default that anybody would do to keep the country from collapsing. But it’s not enough because the attack’s been launched, and Trump can’t get the laws or the funding to stop it. And once they overwhelm the courts and once they overwhelm the detention facilities it’s over. You’ll have 10 million in the next year come in. It was a million and a half illegals that they know of last year, probably 4 million they don’t. 10 million, it’s estimated, will pour in this year. 10 million people. And there is a crime culture and MS-13 and a smuggling culture, and all the lawlessness that you see in Latin America is now here and it’s causing giant crime explosions.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/06/the-terrifying-world-of-alex-jones