(Photo: Dan Winters)
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(Photo: Dan Winters) |
A shadowy group of elites—mainly
international bankers but also George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the Clintons, most of the
mainstream media, the Saudi royal family, and Google—is trying to enslave the
Earth’s population through orchestrated terror attacks and revolutions, vast economic
manipulation, vaccines and fluoride, and an ever-widening system of surveillance that
includes Facebook. Â
That’s the truth—at least, the truth according to Alex
Jones, a popular talk-radio host who is today’s leading proponent and marketer of
political paranoia. “The globalists have stolen the world’s power,” he told
me recently, with surprisingly abundant good cheer. “Their big dream, and all they
talk about, is creating a super bioweapon, basically based on a mouse pox, and just turn
it loose and kill almost everybody. It kills about 99 percent of whatever mammal you
design it for. It’s their
Given these views, it was a little odd to see the thickset Jones,
dressed in black, squeezed in between Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters on ABC’s The
View in late February, talking about Charlie Sheen. Goldberg, in fact, looked a little
stunned when Jones, a close friend of Sheen’s through the 9/11 “Truther”
movement, which posits that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by Bush and others, began
steering the conversation away from the celebrity train wreck and into the wilds of
political conspiracy.
“Charlie Sheen is tired of being judged as the ultimate
demon in this world,” growled Jones. “He didn’t kill a million people in
At one point, Goldberg tried to lasso
Jones—“You’re talking too fast for me, baby, slow down”—but Jones
darted away.
“They’ve got the TSA putting their hand down
people’s pants,” he insisted. “We’ve got the banks bankrupting the
“Let’s stick with Charlie,” interjected Goldberg
again, “?’cause that’s way too much for me, man.”
“He didn’t steal $27.3 trillion, like the Federal
Reserve!” yelled Jones. “Torture! Secret arrests!
The women of The View, having lost control of their
program, looked relieved to cut to a commercial. But Jones was only starting his grand
tour through the mainstream media: That night, he appeared with Joy Behar to talk more
about Sheen. Matt Drudge linked to a story on Jones’s website, Infowars.com, spiking traffic. There were
also appearances on A&E and the History Channel.
Large swathes of
This is the wave Alex Jones is riding. Fifteen years ago, he was
an obscure FM talker in
And besides conspiring to steal his show, Beck is part of the
bigger conspiracy. “He’s got psychological-warfare operatives writing some of
that teleprompter stuff,” says Jones. “I’ve watched it. It’s very
sophisticated; it’s very dangerous.”
Photographs: Remi Benali/Getty Images (SWAT Team); Joe
Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images (TSA security checkpoint); Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
Images (FEMA, Bush with Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud); Stuwdamdorp/Alamy (burning
money); Courtesy of Alex Jones (Jones); J. Scott Applewhite/AP photo (Federal Reserve, CIA
building). Richard Drew/AP Photo (
Just who it is who’s dangerous is another question. The
possible influence of Jones and other conspiracy-mongers became a subject of controversy
after the attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others by Jared Lee Loughner,
who was said to be a devotee of a Jones-affiliated 9/11 video called Loose Change,
as well as Zeitgeist, an online film by a freelance video editor who has worked for
advertising agencies and shares a number of Jones’s interests, like the 9/11 Truth
movement and the century-old conspiracy theory that the Federal Reserve is running the
world.
“There’s this big storm blowing through, and it’s
going to knock some trees over,” is how Jones explains the
"Okay, let’s do it,”
intones Jones, preparing to go on air the day after his appearance on The View.
“Let’s hammer them hard. Initiate primary ignition! We are launch! Go!”
Jones makes a laser sound, and the Star Wars imperial
theme music starts up.
“The news is intensifying,” he begins. He takes the
day’s events—upheaval in Egypt—and reframes them in JonesVision: Instead
of the democratic revolution everybody else sees, Jones sees a covert disruption by
globalist forces, probably the CIA, “to basically have some new hot spots to pour
money into. The military-industrial complex isn’t gorged enough.”
For Jones, it’s not that conspiracies are getting more
popular now but that the world is waking up to the reality that he and Ron Paul have known
all along.
“Dollar devaluation, global banking cartels, out-of-control
federal government, police state—all happened,” Jones tells me with certainty,
sitting in his studio in
Alex Jones has been broadcasting since the mid-nineties, when Ron
Paul, during a run for Congress in 1996, became a frequent guest. Jones takes some credit
for Paul’s rise to prominence, calling his radio show “part of the concrete slab
that the Ron Paul rocket is fueling on.”
Paul doesn’t embrace the full Jones package, of course. And
Jones’s views have grown to include conspiracy theories from the left as
well—he’s a crossover artist. “They blew it up, period!” he barks,
speaking of the
“I mean, the point is, you start trying to go over the
evidence of 9/11, it will make your mind melt down if you actually sat there with the
endless documented facts,” he continues.
“And you want to say our government wouldn’t do
that?” he asks incredulously. “Look at Operation
The meme of 9/11 as inside job was, traditionally, a left-wing
obsession. There are whiffs of it in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and the
further left you go, the more elaborate the conspiracy becomes. But it turns out that the
world of paranoia is round, and 9/11, with its billowing smoke and miles of video and a
cast of thousands, is the terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties
countercultural distrust with the don’t-tread-on-me variety.
Initially, Jones lost 70 percent of his radio stations when he
began talking about 9/11 Truth, he says. It didn’t fit into the talking points of the
right-wing radio audience. But if Jones lost one audience, he began to gain another, much
larger one online. As he stoked the Truther movement, rebuilding his show around a new,
even more amped-up audience, celebrities like Charlie Sheen started calling him.
“That was right when he was breaking up with Denise Richards,” recounts Jones.
Since then, Sheen has been on several times, including the appearance in which he made the
infamous rant against the co-creator of Two and a Half Men that started his recent
jihad against his corporate overlords.
As Jones expanded, he gained radio stations in even bigger
markets, including
|
Alex
Jones on The View in February. |
It was Matt
Drudge, whose obsessions with overreaching corporations like Google and his daily
charting of the most granular signs of the Apocalypse add a nonpartisan element to his
site’s right-wing cant, who did more than anyone else to make Jones more visible.
“If you had to say there was one source who really helped us break out, who took our
information, helped to punch it out to an even more effective level, he’s the
guy,” says Jones. “Three years ago, there was almost no news coverage of
Bilderberg [an elite conference] in this country; there was an electronic Berlin Wall.
Drudge, every year, takes our reportage and links to it on our site.”
Jones says that it’s now “intensifying how much he
links to us and promotes us,” recalling how Drudge, this past Christmas, made every
link on the site green for the holidays—except links to Infowars, which Drudge
published in red. “It was like a Christmas present,” says Jones.
If Jones had allies in
The banking crisis looked, on its face, like proof that
conspiracies were real. Goldman Sachs bankers worked in both the Bush and Obama
administrations; the government bailed out AIG, which prevented big Goldman losses. As
bankers took home enormous bonuses and unemployment shot to 10 percent, the leap to a
“globalist” conspiracy was not very far.
One financial blog, Zero Hedge, run by a pseudonymous former hedge-fund analyst, drew a huge
audience fueled by the same economic anger that eventually breathed life into the populist
tea party. Zero Hedge even inspired Senator Chuck Schumer to call on the SEC to
investigate the issue of electronic trading in Congress, even as the blog fanned the
belief that an elite cabal of Goldman execs ran the entire country.
It was out of this wave of anger and data points that a film
called Zeitgeist emerged. I first heard of this film from a day trader in early
2009 as it circulated in the financial community, where conspiracy theories flourished as
the Dow plunged. It was posted on Google Video by a man who calls himself Peter Joseph, a
composer and video editor. He pieced it together from video clips and still images and
crafted the dark, moody music himself. The three-part movie synthesized the entirety of
current events with three archetypal conspiracies: 9/11 Truth, the hidden secrets of the
Federal Reserve, and the pagan origins of Christianity. It seemed to explain every aspect
of global chaos in two hours.
“The idea was to hit people really hard with contrary
information in an exciting way,” says Joseph. “I threw the work up on the
Internet, and within a number of weeks, it started getting millions of views.”
His was a kind of New Age take on Jones’s pet conspiracies,
co-opting them for a more apolitical, spiritual movement. In the surge of attention,
Joseph had to work out licensing arrangements for the clips he used, then made two
sequels, the latest of which, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, was screened at Tribeca
Cinemas in
Not surprisingly, Joseph and Jones became quick enemies.
“I can’t stand Alex Jones,” says Joseph. “I
can’t handle all these people who are so extreme and dogmatic. People really
misinterpret my work.”
Jones debated Joseph on his radio program. “All he talks
about is reeducating everyone,” snips Jones. “If that’s not tyranny, I
don’t know what is.”
Jones is buzzed by his appearance on The
View. On his site, it says he “culture jammed” the program, and he gleefully
mocks Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg on his show.
“You realize that people hold up these big TV people like
they’re gods,” he says. “But it was like being with these shriveled,
demonic harpies, these empty vassalswho between them couldn’t do a crossword
puzzle.”
I ask him why he wants to be on mainstream media, amid the elite
he claims to hate. “I want to have a communication with the Establishment and say,
‘Do you really like what you’ve done?’?” he says. “?‘Do you really want to keep going with some plan that Cecil
Rhodes came up with 100 years ago? Do you really want the big megabanks making hundreds of
millions of dollars per quarter while everything else goes bankrupt?’?”
After the show, Jones sits in his studio and monitors hits of his
own name on Google News, which seem to pop up every few seconds because of the Charlie
Sheen media explosion.
Jones is an entertainer—he studied broadcasting at a
community college—and hardly unambitious. At one point, he suggests we title this
story “Duh—Winning!” He has a staff of 25 and recently built a TV studio
for his webcast. He has big dreams of starting an online social network and even a
newspaper distributed in major cities. His sense of the Internet, where he has a massive
Google footprint of alarming news clips and full-length YouTube movies like The Obama Deception
and Fall of the
Republic, is that it’s a virtual feeding pond for his ideas.
“I’m just throwing pebbles in the pond, and over time
it starts making bigger and bigger waves,” says Jones.
The pond is ready. The one-two punch of the financial collapse
and the election of a man whose last name rhymes with Osama mainstreamed conspiracy in the
form of Fox News’s Glenn Beck.
Jones couldn’t help but notice. After I asked for examples
of how Beck ripped him off, Jones went ahead and created a YouTube video titled “The
Glenn Beck Secret,” showing how Beck allegedly lifted Jones’s ideas, one after
the other. In Jones’s view, Beck has repackaged his ideas to serve GOP talking
points, a tricky way of keeping people tethered to the two-party paradigm that lulls the
masses into believing government actually serves their interests (“a control grid
used to manipulate the people”).
When Beck, for instance, talks about Google as overly close to
government agencies and therefore in cahoots with “hard-core leftists,” Jones
points out that he preceded Beck in reporting that Google was an “NSA-CIA spy
center,” and Jones, the truth-teller, didn’t try separating it from Bush’s
wiretapping, which Jones sees as part of the same manipulation machine. “Glenn Beck
has ripped us off on the Google boycott and then spun it deceptively,” he says.
Jones takes Beck’s success personally. “It’s very,
very painful to see this biological android, a complete actor, reading off teleprompters
and singing and dancing around and prancing around, a fairy dancing and prancing around,
using my material,” he says.
In the chaotic, largely leaderless media environment, truth
standards are in the eye of the beholder, and this has consequences. Polls show that
public faith in institutions like Congress and the media are at an all-time low.
“Eleven percent,” says Jones. “
“There’s been a total loss of confidence, to the point
now that the public is awake,” explains Jones, “but almost in a twisted,
psychologically drugged state where people don’t trust anything.”
And not coincidentally—remember, nothing in Jones’s
world is a coincidence—the rise of Jones’s show tracks closely with the price of
gold. In 1999, when the price of gold bottomed out at $252.55 per ounce, Jones had about
200,000 listeners on an average day; now the price is above $1,400, and he has upwards of
3 million listeners through radio and the Internet. Gold advertisers account for roughly
25 percent of revenue for Jones. “I grew up with gold,” he says. “It grew
up with me.”
Another noncoincidence: Jones’s main sponsor is a gold
company, called Midas Resources, owned by his longtime business partner, Ted Anderson.
Midas, which literally sends its customers gold bars and coins in the mail, also
advertises with Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. In one sense, Jones’s
whole program can be seen as an advertising front for Midas, urging listeners to find
shelter in precious metals, the symbol of comfort and certainty for currency obsessives,
as he keeps up the drumbeat of dark and forbidding news that paints the world as a place
where survival gear and water purifiers may be necessary any minute now. As an investment,
it was pretty smart: Midas has become one of the top five gold companies in the
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor
whom President Obama appointed as his “regulatory czar” in 2009, published a
paper the year before about the dangers of conspiracy theories, and people who suffer from
what he called “crippled epistemologies,” to public trust and the political
system. Among his examples were 9/11 Truthers and the widespread myth that AIDS was spread
by the government.
“They do not merely undermine democratic debate,” he
wrote, with a co-author, Adrian Vermeule. “In extreme cases, they create or fuel
violence. If government can dispel such theories, it should do so.”
Sunstein’s conclusions eerily foreshadowed the case of Jared
Lee Loughner, who had marinated in online conspiracy theories before going on the shooting
spree that killed six and badly maimed Congresswoman Giffords. Loughner’s case was
much murkier than any white supremacist’s, and therefore scarier. His mélange of
interests included Marxism, Mein Kampf, 9/11 Truth, and Zeitgeist.
Sunstein described conspiracists as being caught up in what he
called “informational cascades,” in which a person accepts an explanation for an
event when people he trusts offer up a conclusion with a high degree of confidence, even
if they’re only speculating. Initial speculation “can start a process by which a
number of people are led to participate in a cascade, accepting a conspiracy theory whose
factual foundations are fragile.”
In this way, false information, augmented by fancy editing and
music and narrated with authority, can travel fast, taking on greater and greater
credibility the more it is linked to and e-mailed and posted by like-minded and trusted
sources. “The conspiracy theory is initially accepted by people with low thresholds
for its acceptance,” Sunstein’s paper argues. “Sometimes the informational
pressure builds, to the point where many people, with somewhat higher thresholds, begin to
accept the theory too.”
In a sense, Loughner, in his quest for answers to his own psychic
confusion, was a person with a low threshold for acceptance, and he found himself buffeted
by information cascades on the Internet, bouncing from political conspiracies to obscure
language theories, a psychologically precarious man unable to distinguish fact from
fiction.
To which Jones responded with a new cascade, interpreting
Loughner’s actions as evidence of government mind control in action. “Well, see,
that’s the problem with a question like this, is there’s so much evidence to
it,” he says, rattling off what he considers proof that most of the major political
assassins and domestic terrorists of the past 30 years were under mind control.
“There’s encyclopedic amounts of evidence.”
Sunstein’s paper was roundly attacked, mainly because he
proposed ways to deal with conspiracies that were academically and politically tone-deaf,
like covert infiltration of conspiracy groups and collaborating with third parties armed
with counterinformation.
Jones, in keeping with Sunstein’s warning that “efforts
to rebut conspiracy theories also legitimate them,” pointed to it as proof that the
government was trying to control people’s minds. But Jones wasn’t the only one
who took umbrage: Glenn Greenwald, the liberal Salon columnist, argued that some of the
most destructive conspiracy theories “emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to
endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the
In the new media universe, where Jones and Greenwald (and Rachel
Maddow and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh) are virtual allies in their distrust of
institutional authority and in fact feed on it, a wormhole has opened from the most
far-flung and seemingly insane corners to the precincts where most of us live—and it
doesn’t seem likely to close anytime soon.
On a large TV screen behind Jones, part
of his new set design for his webcast, are rotating images of Charlie Sheen, Egyptian
protesters, Ron Paul, an ad for Police State 4, and Julian Assange.
Assange, the poster boy for the idea of government transparency,
shares with Jones the belief that the powers that be are an elite cabal oppressing the
masses. In a 2006 essay, Assange wrote, “We see conspiratorial interactions among the
political elite not merely for preferment or favor within the regime, but as the primary
planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power.”
Both men view themselves as antidotes to secrecy. If all the
information comes out, they maintain, the conspiracy will be proved; ipso facto, it will
be eliminated and the righteous will be victorious, with Assange and Jones as insurgent
heroes. As Jones says to his listeners: “If you are receiving this
transmission—You! Are! The resistance!”
It’s an archetypal story, right out of Joseph
But the conspiracy market is so crowded now that real conspiracy
may be harder than ever to spot. Jones, far from accepting the WikiLeaks documents
literally, sees Assange as part of the conspiracy. And Assange sees people like Jones as
adversaries. “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false
conspiracies such as 9/11,” he has said, “when all around we provide evidence of
real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.”
I often wondered, talking to Jones, if he really believed this
shtick. When I press him about the mouse-pox scenario—I mean, c’mon—his
voice rises to radio-host volume while he insists that these “supertechnologies of
genetic engineering … will make 1,000 Chernobyls look like child’s play.”
When I’m not convinced, Jones softens his argument a bit,
saying the elites, as powerful as they are, are also ham-fisted and might not pull it off.
“They’re only able to wreck things and dominate things like a 10,000-pound
gorilla,” he says, “and the world is sinking because they’re jumping around
on top of it.”
Jones is undoubtedly a new kind of talent, using cinematic
imagery drawn from science fiction, informed by a deep knowledge of history, and grafting
it all to a Google News feed. The show is a kind of poetry with an epic sweep. It’s
his theatrical certainty, his ability to not blink, that glues the fiction to the facts.
“In the general scope of history and common sense, and studying how humans operate,
we’re
Perhaps. Or maybe that’s just what reality looks like in the
Internet age, when information has broken the levees of mainstream interpretation and no
one knows whom or what to believe anymore. Sometimes Jones seems like a pro wrestler,
making a grandiose faux spectacle of global upheaval, political corruption, and
natural disaster that was dangerous enough on its own. If Jones believes there’s
fantasy in his presentation, he never lets on. But he does make one statement that pretty
much everyone, wherever in the politico-cultural universe they may reside, can agree on:
“The fact that Alex Jones is becoming widely accepted,” says Alex Jones,
“that’s prima facie evidence right there that we’re in deep crap.”
Alex Jones tells a story: He was in the
greenroom at CNN, waiting to go on The Joy Behar Show, when he ran into Fareed
Zakaria, the Time magazine columnist and foreign-affairs analyst. Jones buttonholed
him about the Bilderberg Group, the yearly conference of select leaders whom Jones
believes to be an elite cabal of globalist conspirators.
“He knew exactly who I was,” says Jones of Zakaria.
“I said, ‘I want to talk to you about the Bilderberg Group,’ and he
actually shuddered. Like, with his imperial conditioning, he said, ‘Oh, it’s no
big deal; other journalists go there, not just me.’?”
In this anecdote, Jones was confronting the elites, calling them
on their B.S. But if Jones can help it, he’s going to be hanging out in a lot more
greenrooms soon. Ted Anderson sees Jones getting his own TV show any moment now. And the
programming of Fox News, he believes, is moving in Jones’s direction.
“They’re loosening up a little bit about the types of
things you can talk about,” says
Jones calls Fox News “alternative media for old
people,” which is why he believes Fox has begun aping his edgy take on the world,
especially on the Fox Business Network, where libertarian views have more traction.
“They’re taking the nomenclature I’ve used,” he says, “as they
move toward the transition to more of what I’m doing. And I have that from inside.
I’m not going to say any names, but I have multiple sources.”
Jones and Anderson are friends of Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox
Business Network host who is a frequent guest on Jones’s program, not to mention a
popular substitute for Glenn Beck. “And now Fox, more and more, if you watch Andrew
Napolitano’s show—‘Fighting the Tyranny,’ ‘Restoring the
Republic,’ ‘The Rebellion Is Here’—they’re trying to duplicate
that,” says Jones. “Beck was the test, and now they’re bringing it all
online. They know that’s the wave of the future.” (This is a wave Jones may not
be riding. “I’m sure Alex, like many others, wishes he had a platform on Fox
News,” said Fox News programming executive vice-president Bill Shine.
“That’s not going to happen, so he should stick with trying to locate the black
helicopters.”)
Jones is careful to give Roger Ailes, the Fox News chief, an out
on the whole “globalist” agenda. “He actually knows all about this
stuff,” says Jones. “His bodyguards keep him safe from the New World Order. And
that’s a fact. Navy SEALS. Retired Navy SEALS.”
Jones isn’t a man for understatement. At one point in our
conversation, he claims the governor of
Perry’s people say that’s not true, of course. But it
makes some sense. Perry, like many Republicans, has courted the tea party and tacked right
of the mainstream GOP, trying to get ahead of political currents in his own state. And
Jones is tacking that way, too, following the audience, talking about Obama’s birth
certificate, selling gold bricks. Advertisements on his site ask, “Is this the end of
America?,” which is pretty much the same anxiety-producing message that Sarah
Palin, if she runs in 2012, or Mitt Romney, for that matter, will try to exploit.
The difference between Jones and the rest of these people, says
Jones, is, “I’m consciously trying to tell the truth.”
You can see why he might believe this. The more history unfolds,
the more successful he seems to become. The scales, he says, have simply fallen from our
eyes.
“And there’s more scales under those,” says Alex
Jones. (3.27.2011, Joe Hagan) http://nymag.com/print/?/news/media/alex-jones-2011-4
"To Achieve World
Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
their loyalty to family traditions and national identification" Brock Chisholm - Director of the World Health Organization
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to
believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a
reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police
State Dictatorship it's going to
get." Ian Williams Goddard
The fact is that "political correctness" is all about creating uniformity. Individualism is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of the New World Order. They want a public that is predictable and conditioned to do as it's told without asking questions.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson
