Controlled Opposition: Hard Questions About Alex Jones

[lightningBugout]

I'd personally say that Alex Jones is 60% good stuff and 40% rat poison, very roughly speaking.

Which of the material AJ covers fits into that good 60%?

[American Dream]

I was actually speaking fairly flippantly to break it down into percentages but I would say that AJ's reportage on the growth of the surveillance state and the various intrusions of Authority into our individual lives is where you find much of the material that I might agree with.

But I don't personally do "NWO" rhetoric, much less xenophobic, racist immigrant-bashing...

[Canadian_watcher]

Many of the things I read about here I've read about on Infowars first. The oil spill & the midwifery ban are two recent examples that come to mind.

I think, quite honestly, that many people (even here on RI) are simply not ready for some of the paradigm shifts that would have to take place if they let themselves believe in a lot of what Jones says. It is about time that people realized that it is not just Jones, either, there are a lot of experienced educated and intelligent people that have the same worldview as he does, albeit usually with a narrower focus.

It is tough for us to go out into our daily social /work circles and admit that there might actually be a cabal of wealthy powermongers who control the planet across all borders. It's too hard to take and so the baby goes out with the bathwater.

For the record I find the GCN sponsors to be pretty close to disgusting and I have found myself wondering if this whole movement isn't about selling gold. But all in all he does bring a lot of hidden history to the table, and that's never a bad thing, IMHO.

[American Dream]

I understand your point, but the "excess baggage" he brings is really, really problematic.

Enough so to make me consider him a kind of trojan horse for highly destructive memes...

[Pele'sDaughter]

I agree. Got over Mr. Jones very quickly. Haven't linked to Prison Planet for years, and I don't miss it one bit. To me, it's too important that people get the truth to risk referring them to someone like Jones who employs exaggeration, fearmongering, and outright racism on this immigration issue. I'm capable of discerning but don't want to use such sources with others; my credibility is too important.

[Simulist]

Many of the things I read about here I've read about on Infowars first. The oil spill & the midwifery ban are two recent examples that come to mind.

I think, quite honestly, that many people (even here on RI) are simply not ready for some of the paradigm shifts that would have to take place if they let themselves believe in a lot of what Jones says. It is about time that people realized that it is not just Jones, either, there are a lot of experienced educated and intelligent people that have the same worldview as he does, albeit usually with a narrower focus.

It is tough for us to go out into our daily social /work circles and admit that there might actually be a cabal of wealthy powermongers who control the planet across all borders. It's too hard to take and so the baby goes out with the bathwater.

For the record I find the GCN sponsors to be pretty close to disgusting and I have found myself wondering if this whole movement isn't about selling gold. But all in all he does bring a lot of hidden history to the table, and that's never a bad thing, IMHO.

Alex Jones brings "hidden history to the table," and then makes it look stupid.

He puts forth information suggestive of "a cabal of wealthy powermongers who control the planet across all borders," and then makes any truth to it look stupid.

That there actually may be some people who "are simply not ready for some of the paradigm shifts that would have to take place if they let themselves believe in a lot of what Jones says" isn't really in question, at least by me. What is in question is "a lot of what Jones says" (and does!) that makes whatever valuable stuff he actually might say look stupid.

Over the years, Alex Jones has made himself (and those associated with him) look ridiculously silly, even a little crazy. If I were a "powermonger," and I wanted to discredit particular information I didn't want to be publicly believed about me or my activities, I'd leak some of it to Infowars so that it could be given the Alex Jones Treatment™. Before you knew what happened none of the influential people who many consider "serious people" would even consider taking it seriously.

And the manipulation would continue, unabated. (Thanks, Alex.)

[elfismiles]

The argument that info could be leaked through alex to discredit said info can and has been applied to just about every person with a voice.

A friend of mine described Alex as someone whose talk gets folks riled up such that they go out and talk up those topics that got them riled up and then become much more obvious targets for the PTB. He drew an analogy to hawks and birds-of-prey squawking above a field and down below some of the prey freeze in terror while others bolt in fear ... and then become prime targets of the hunting/squawking bird of prey.

I don't think that analogy is perfect but I think there is some truth to it - though I've never actually found a reference to birds of prey squawking in order to scare up dinner.

I really don't think there is a simple answer to the issue of "activists", "opportunists", "salesmen", "disinfoteer" (whatever you wanna call AJ or others) being labeled as such for their mixing of their own persona's and/or WOO and/or misinfo-fear-mongering. People criticize this joint (RI) for mixing paranormal and parapolitical info. People criticize AJ for NOT covering the paranormal. People criticize anyone and everyone for not conforming to their expectations of talking-heads covering whatever pet theories and interests the jilted-feeling listener wants their talking head to be covering.

Alex is obviously problematic because he has become a phenomenon unto himself and is exerting significant influence within the realms of various types of people from those who want to be strictly political activist types to those who simply want to hear the latest conspiratainment headlines that reinforce either, a-their existing belief that conspiranoids are crazy but fun to listen to, or b-their belief in the oppression of their demographic as repressed by the big bad PTB (insert whatever dubious specialized type of PTB you want here, ie - Joos, NWO, aliens, dero, demons, satan, big bad government).

[Simulist]

The argument that info could be leaked through alex to discredit said info can and has been applied to just about every person with a voice.

So the argument gets misapplied a lot. That should be expected.

Alex Jones seems a particularly good fit for the argument.

[Canadian_watcher]

I hear all of your points .. and have heard them lots of times. What strikes me is the snobbery inherent in it.

RI regular "Listen, *I* can certainly pull out the wheat from the chaff when I deign to listen to blowhards like Jones but i just don't trust the great unwashed to be able to do the same."

I respect your rights to disagree with me, but I think Jones is a legitimately important voice. Like elfismiles said above, people have their own expectations of what a voice of the people ought to be and they come down hard on anyone who they think is 'close but no cigar'.. There is good and bad in everyone and while I agree that Jones is embarassingly silly very, very often I am able to accept that he is a passionate human who wears his heart & beliefs on his sleeve. I respect that immensely.

Yeah, there are things about him that get my hackles up. Sure. But name your political/resistance leader and I'll tell you what I don't like about him or her. Doesn't mean I have to chastise that person to the point where I reduce what's good about them into dust.

[Simulist]

I hear all of your points .. and have heard them lots of times. What strikes me is the snobbery inherent in it.

Nice.

[nathan28]

Many of the things I read about here I've read about on Infowars first. The oil spill & the midwifery ban are two recent examples that come to mind.

Infowars is a news filter. I could say the same about Disinfo.com in its c. 1999 incarnation--many stories and trends I learned about I saw their first, and this was before Google had politely aggregated headlines. There's a connection between the oil spill and the midwifery ban, but it's a religious one, and I don't mean that in the sense of Satanic Panic Mystery Babalon Bohemian Grove Ancient Order of the Scary White Business Man.

I think, quite honestly, that many people (even here on RI) are simply not ready for some of the paradigm shifts that would have to take place if they let themselves believe in a lot of what Jones says. It is about time that people realized that it is not just Jones, either, there are a lot of experienced educated and intelligent people that have the same worldview as he does, albeit usually with a narrower focus.

It is tough for us to go out into our daily social /work circles and admit that there might actually be a cabal of wealthy powermongers who control the planet across all borders. It's too hard to take and so the baby goes out with the bathwater.

You think this is difficult to admit? Every freaking day it should be very obvious that if not a cabal than a narrow set of interests for a narrow sliver of the world are those most actively promulgated & acted upon. The only instance I can think of where "cabal" might be helpful would be the actors who participated in the Iran-Contra milieu, the Calvi assassination and potentially 9/11/01, and in each instance we aren't talking about the same people although there is overlap. There's a religious injunction against mentioning those, too, but it's because Americans specialize in amnesia, and after all, if you spent four hours everyday in a car, you'd want to forget everything, too. That overlap means we don't have a cabal, we have a set of similar interests who benefit from what some academics recently termed "state crimes against democracy". To take up another line of analysis, the eugenics movement was very strong in the US, enough so that Adolph Hitler cited it, and had key proponents who we can identify as the promulgators of that movement. You could have said the same thing about the neoconservatives c. 2002: it's shocking how closely related they are, in the married-to-each-other's cousins way. None of this points to a singular cabal.

The other thing about "cabal" is that it ignores what actually happens. The CFR / Trilateral Comm'n / Foreign Policy crowd have *never* been unified w/r/t questions of means. Part of the reasons the militaristic neocons could get any grip on power, when fifteen years earlier they had been referred to as "the crazies", was that the hawkish element in the ruling class was ascendant while the more dovish libertarians and liberals had largely been out of favor. And that isn't a generic statement. If you looked at the publishing world, you'd see a massive revisionist push by the likes of R. Pipes, Keegan, D. Kagan in history. Compare what these jokers advocate--with the Kennedy era anticommunists, and there's a clear difference. Not that Kennedy's policy record is that much worth considering, but that he had to go shows that there is division among the upper echelons.

This doesn't exclude the possibility of long-range or detailed planning by people key to those narrow interests I mentioned. Arguably though we'll never know, not for the next decade, 9/11/01 was Iran Contra 2K1, largely hatched with some of the same people. The 40 years of planning and action by the American Right, in the Scaife and Koch and H.L. Hunt manifestation of buying the universities and pushing the think tanks and crafting the terms of the debate, like "liberal media" in wake of Vietnam, is another example.

For the record I find the GCN sponsors to be pretty close to disgusting and I have found myself wondering if this whole movement isn't about selling gold. But all in all he does bring a lot of hidden history to the table, and that's never a bad thing, IMHO.

It helps to put this into context. The initial impetus for the gold-guns-alternative-health treatments, at least one of them, is to me clearly the Volker era interest rate hikes. This is why I think the "cabal" argument is specious, because what Volker did was so extreme and so public--IOW, obvious--that if it was a shadowy cabal, they're not very good at keeping in the shadows. Volker jacked interest rates skyhigh, ostensibly to keep the economy afloat and kill inflation. In effect it caused massive consolidation and directly assisted the rise of oligopoly in agriculture. It answered the American agrarian question: families are inefficient, ArcherDanielsMidland is not, therefore, ADM is going to buy every family farm in America whether they want to sell or not, everyone else be damned.

Farmers are dependent upon loans. But if you make interest on their loans >15%? They're toast. This isn't speculative. The late Carter/early Reagan era saw massive dislocation in the Midwest and rural areas, as agribusiness consolidated, swooping in and buying out the broke family farms.

See that, though? "Family farms"? It means that something as abstract as the cost of money could undo an entire way of life, a culture. I can't remember the journalist now but he pointed out that this is the origin of the Patriot movement--which provided a convenient reactionary bastion for powerful interests to exploit. As one lawyer put it, the only truly American religious tradition is Anti-Freemasonry. An this became KKK Anti-Catholicism, which becomes Arizona-style anti-immigrant law. Americans have consistently turned to nativism, like what Alex Jones advocates. And to tie that to gold, Volker's policy suggests that real inflation was briefly around 15%, meaning prices on everything were doubling every five years. Cash was trash, unless you used it to buy a 30-year treasury bond or gold and to a lesser extent real estate. So with the massive social churn, combined with financial situation that caused it, you do see the rise of a culture that's deeply conservative and deeply wary of finance of any sort. I'd be fucking paranoid, too, if the gov't had abruptly destroyed my cultural position.

[crikkett]

the midwifery ban

Sorry to interrupt, but it's not a midwifery ban.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28207&p=336623#p336639

PS IMO Alex Jones is a valid voice just like Rush Limbaugh is a valid voice and Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin, and whaterface skinny blonde and the girl whose real name is Michelle Maglalong -- um, Michelle Malkin.

They open their mouths and use their voice to spread disinformation or outright lies. Why any intelligent person (who is not paying them to spread lies) pays attention to them is beyond me.

[JackRiddler]

Many of the things I read about here I've read about on Infowars first. The oil spill & the midwifery ban are two recent examples that come to mind.

Well, just to address your two examples. If he hit the oil spill soon after it happened, then this says he can be quick with breaking news items, which in itself is neither a virtue nor a vice. (In fact, to be honest, it's one of the things I hate the most about him: the fanatical devotion of his crew, some paid, others fan-volunteers, to monitor and put a very predictable spin on every story faster than anyone else, thus defining the quasi-official "conspiracy" view on each thing as it happens.) I mean, you would have heard about the oil spill without him, and you'd know about the roles of BP, Halliburton, the non-existent regulators under various admins without him, no?

And the midwife ban is another perfect illustration of Alex Jones at his worst. There was no midwife ban in New York. Something bad happened, but to call what happened a midwife ban is 100 percent AJ spin: a fabrication. Here's one case where you're really better off reading the mainstream press. See the midwife thread for the real story.

[JackRiddler]

cw, I really don't want to gang up and I hope you won't take this as further snobbery, but:

It is tough for us to go out into our daily social /work circles and admit that there might actually be a cabal of wealthy powermongers who control the planet across all borders. It's too hard to take and so the baby goes out with the bathwater.

I disagree. It's really really easy and this is what most people seem to think, though they don't talk about it much and avoid those who do because they don't want to be tainted with "politics," they want to talk TV and sports and so forth. I think nathan28's answer is a great one, everyone should probably reread it before proceeding with my lesser thoughts.

Cabal theory is a mystification of reality. There is no "cabal of wealthy powermongers." There are ruling classes who own, and power elites who administrate, a set of overlapping empires (industries, resources, nation-states) that over time have tended to merge into a set of global interests (though the merger is never complete and can be reversed), and from which cabals are often spawned with their own particular agendas.

This is not just a more academic way of saying the same thing. It is a big difference. My wording describes a system that must change - the biggest question being ownership and control of the levers of power, which is capital. If you eliminated any given cabal, the system would not change. It would be reconstituted under different sets of cabals, which together constitute CLASSES.

It's a whole way of life that needs transforming, and not just who runs it. Who runs it is important, insofar as it won't transform overnight and some elites may be slightly more enlightened and move things closer toward that transformation than others, who will make things even worse.

In my view, the problem is the inequality in the distribution of resources and power (capital is a good shorthand) among various groups, the largest of which are left defenseless against well-placed minorities who control capital (and who are both in the state and outside it). Also, the ideology that justifies taking advantage of your power over others to exploit them maximally as a worthy expression of god's will, or of evolution, or of economic rationality (the basis can vary, long as the message is the same).

In Jones's world, it's all about eliminating a THEM who have caused all problems because they hate freedom - after which everyone else is left as free, fully autonomous individuals who will associate in liberty and produce the best possible world through the action of the free market, in which the deserving rise and the undeserving do not. This is pure mythology, and perniciously its only practical result will be to support the hated present system or to allow its next version to be reconstituted after a historical upheaval.

[Canadian_watcher]

I hear all of your points .. and have heard them lots of times. What strikes me is the snobbery inherent in it.

Nice.

I tried to be gentle while pointing out that in spite of the vocabulary used on this board you are 'the other people'

Everyone's a snob in some way, don't take it so hard.