Controlled Opposition: Hard Questions About Alex Jones

[nathan28]

Alex Jones is of course currently the target of a campaign to get him to push the "ZOG" view of world conspiracy. Here as one example of that is the commentary accompanying a Youtube video recently put up to criticize/pressure him:

Reading Patriotardisms about Jones almost makes me respect him.

[elfismiles]

From the video clip at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wrrO8wbpFo

HA! Just confirmed what I thought when I listened to that clip... I know the caller.

[American Dream]

Alex Jones Pimps Phony Race War

by Ed Encho | Op-Ed News | May 10, 2010

Alex Jones, the proprietor of Infowars.com, a man who I have had serious reservations over for awhile now but due to the concept of finding an occasional diamond in a mountain of manure I have largely refrainied from critcizing is over the line. Mr. Jones, an influential online radio host, documentary producer and bombastic self-purported thruth sayer despite his failure to ever call out the Texas Oil Nazis, the Koch family, the Council For National Policy or the John Birch Society on his syndicated show has now began to promote a dangerous meme.

I speak of the ridiculous and inflammatory jihad against the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film Machete which the morons over at Infowars are calling out as an instigation for a race war. This is what happens when those that have been subjected to dehumanization, deligitimization and demagogy over a prolonged period like Hispanics finally counterattack. The brown menace has been the bread and butter for Jones and a large portion of his listeners for years now, it is painful to have to wade through the global warming denial, whacked out and tired conspiracy theories like flouride in the water, gun grabber paranoia and the incessant race baiting on Jones’s show to hear the guests who actually have something worth a damn to say yet are shut out of saying it anywhere else.

While I have in the past defended Jones and his affiliation with a long list of CNP contributors such as Doctor Stan Monteith despite serious reservations while taking holy hell from my former allies on the left …

Alex Jones and his operation are now exposing themselves as the wolves roving amongst the sheep despite the ongoing falsehoods of waging war against tyranny and corruption and anyone who is a listener should boycott the program over this latest shrill rhetoric. We have very serious problems in this country today regarding real concerns about a rising tide of violence that has already thanks to the demagogues on the right become a cold civil war. Jones and his more refined and famous counterpart (who he is quite obviously jealous of) Glenn Beck have done their damned level best to create a climate of hatred, fear and animosity and using the constant race-baiting black propaganda to do it.

Where did all of those obscene images of the infamous Obama Joker come from? The Alex Jones show, that’s where. And this farcical and ridiculous attempt to manufacture fake outrage to fool his audience into buying the reverse psychological bullshit of the race war that he and his ilk have spent years ginning up as typical lard-assed Texan troglodytes is as beyond the pale as it is ludicrous.

The Christian white majority that has ruled this country and presided over the rapid decline and strip mining of the economy that could never have occurred without their foul stupidity, their meanness, greed and inability to turn their backs on superstition and mass murder will soon be a minority. The coming demographic shift is imminent and irreversable and pigs like Jones and his ilk would rather have blood flowing in the streets than to simply accept the inevitable and try to work towards fighting against the real tyranny – corporatism and the military industrial complex and the unwinnable, bankrupting illegal wars of destruction. It is fitting though that the white man is getting eased out, at least it is more humane this time than when they slaughtered the original indigenous inhabitants of what would come to be known as The Homeland.


http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Alex-Jone ... 0-869.html

[JackRiddler]

A brilliant commentary I ran across that dissects Jones and his worldview:

http://truthaction.org/forum/posting.ph ... 8fc65f1b5b

Illegals steal jobs from the neediest of American citizens and kill unions. This is not a popular viewpoint I know, but it's true.

Right. You just missed the bit about NAFTA destroying Mexican small business and the working class Mexcian economy, virtually making Mexican citizens wage slaves of the worst sorts in their own country--if they're lucky. You'd run away too in their position.

The problem won't be fixed by going after "illegals"--or even defending "illegals". The problem will be fixed when GATT and NAFTA are abolished.

Amen Jenny. Except I disagree about "defending illegals".

This is the great irony, paradox, call it what you will -- the more Nativists/Nationalists/white supremacists/cultural supremacists/border fetishists rant n' rail against "illegal aliens", the more "illegal aliens" will flood across the border.

Why? Because the utility of the illegal migrant worker lies entirely in his or her "illegal" status. It is only because they are "illegal" ie that they are frightened of deportation and therefore cannot appeal to the laws of the land/basic human rights, that they will work for sub-human wages/working conditions, thereby driving down the wages/working conditions of "native" workers.

If workers in bordering states supported "illegal aliens" and formed cross-border unions, the "benefits" (to capitalists) of migrant work forces would evaporate overnight. Equal rights = no benefit to hiring a "Mexican" over an "American".

This whole "blame the illegals" shtick is a fairly constant theme in American history. Whenever times of economic distress emerge, the alien "other" is the first to come under fire. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the The Immigration Act of 1917 (which targeted 'political radicals' from foreign countries aka migrant workers who wished to form unions) to the Bracero Program to Operation whetback to the current manufactured hysteria.

Look at that browned skin or slanty eyed person! He's out to steal yer job! Just don't look at the corporations behind the curtain.

Indeed, immigration hysteria has been one of the most potent tools of the elite throughout American history. It even extended to white skinned folk, with each new wave (German, Irish, etc) blaming the latest newcomers for the latest economic downturn. This tendency was portrayed vividly in Scorcese's "Gangs of New York", though apparently a lot of people were too mesmerized by Daniel Day Lewis' glass eye to understand the subtext.

“Targets of bigotry themselves, these migrants often adopted the racist ideology directed at them by the expansionists, and became the bulwarks of territorial conquest.” (Justin Chakon, No One is illegal).

I recommend readers check out Chakon's aforementioned "No one is Illegal". It chronicles in great detail that the US/Mexico border was "open" during virtually its entire history -- UNTIL the robber barons started stealing too much loot and workers starting organizing (especially under the anarchist Wobblies -- who rejected race and sex as a factor in joining unions, unlike EVERY OTHER union at the time -- therefore they were first targets under the Sedition Act during WWI).

Border hysteria came into its own during the Eugenics movement as a means of demonizing "anti-social" migrant workers as "inferior", "alien other" viruses polluting the white gene pool, and later evolved under NAFTA into the Minutemen/Alex Jones types, who publically eschew racial considerations and focus on "patriotism" aka the myth of a golden past without Mexicans.

I will again quote Anthropologist David Graeber:

“It has become popular, of course, to talk as if the growth of trade and migration are making national borders increasingly irrelevant. Look at the same situation in terms of the last five hundred years. It’s easy to see that, while world trade has increased somewhat, overall migration rates are nothing like what they were one (let alone two or three) hundred years ago, and the only element that’s entirely new here is the presence of the borders themselves. The modern “interstate system,” which carves up the earth through thousands of highly patrolled and regulated borders, was only fully completed quite recently; and far from being eaten away by globalization, institutions like the IMF or WTO are entirely premised on it. The number of armed men patrolling the US border with Mexico has tripled or even quadrupled since the signing of NAFTA; before it, no one was even considering the idea of reinforcing the border with a giant wall.”

Thus, Alex Jones' "NWO" is complete fantasy. "Globalization" has resulted in VASTLY INCREASED border militarization, not the opposite. Which makes perfect sense. If there were no borders, labor could flow as freely as capital, which would completely undermine top-down-'globalism'.

Adam Smith, upon whose arguments Ron Paul and Alex Jones base their entire hare-brained philosophies, believed that without the free flow of labor a "free market" would be impossible. It is with some amusement, therefore, that I see these "libertarians" try to reconcile their hyper-nationalism with their hyper-'free market'-ism.

I expect more of "911 truthers". Most of us recognize that demonizing Muslims serves as a pretext to undermine the civil liberties of dissidents. The same applies to 'illegal aliens". Ron Paul voting IN FAVOR of building of a goddamn wall across the border. The guy's a fucking fruitcake. He greatly admired Ronald Reagan. What more needs to be said?

Look: militarizing the border and hunting for "illegal aliens" will result in decreased liberties for everyone. That's the way it's ALWAYS played out historically. If you want to end illegal immigration, support illegal immigrants. Stop pointing your finger at the poor, stop fetishizing the Americo-Mexican war, and start uniting against the ruling class.

[lightningBugout]

"Despite their rhetoric, the libertarian, patriot, and constitutionalist movements are little more than ideological cover for a return to the bad old days of the Gilded Age."

I was kicking myself for initially supporting Ron Paul during his campaign when I finally realised this.

(and RI helped me come to this conclusion, by the way)

Last month Art Forum had a tripartite piece on Levi Strauss' legacy. It became, in part, a fresh attempt to finally shelve post-structuralism and endorse a return to the exuberance of structural marxism. I noted this as I listened to AJ while doing my dishes recently (something I do out of some perverse sense of responsibility for keeping tabs on what crap he's releasing at any given time) and heard some predictable blabbering about gold. It all made me think of a little manifesto written by cultural geographer David Harvey in the late 1980s called The Condition of Postmodernity (an ironic dig at Lyotard) which was basically a structural marxist attempt to attribute the vast majority of contemporary continental philosophy to the dematerizalization of capital after Nixon ended the Gold Standard. Harvey learned the errors of his ways over the years and wrote some interesting correctives. But that same old wickedly reductionist yearning for the simplest cause of geopolitical and cultural flux struck me as 80% of Ron Paul's appeal. And was perhaps the first time I've noticed a real correspondence within cultural theory and the patriot movement types. (Though my not-well received post about Eagleton and Zizek dabbling in the post 9/11 metaphysical problematics of evil and eschatology is probably related)

Everyone seems to want to go back to 1967 lately.

ps. If you haven't already suffered through the AJ produced Jason Bermas NWO doc, let me apprise you that Americorps and City Year are part of a crypto-fascist plot.

[82_28]

Why? Because the utility of the illegal migrant worker lies entirely in his or her "illegal" status. It is only because they are "illegal" ie that they are frightened of deportation and therefore cannot appeal to the laws of the land/basic human rights, that they will work for sub-human wages/working conditions, thereby driving down the wages/working conditions of "native" workers.

Wow. We've found ourselves a dagummed double bind in the wild, haven't we? Damned if you do and damned if you don't. America, for those who live here, whether anyone anywhere wants to admit it or not is equally on the side of the "Mexican laborer illegal" side of things. Look at the fucking denaturing of the Constitution, look at the normalizing of NO RIGHTS ONCE YOU'RE LABELED THIS OR THAT. I am so fucking sick of the term "slippery slope". But this is what it is. The slippery slope has finally neared the pool in which security fucks are waiting to drown us once we've had our bit of fun down the water slide. See, you pin it all on the "illegal human" existing somewhere on Earth bullshit. Then you pull out the next segment of implementation. It's like motherfucking clockwork and if you pay attention (as I have for many years), you can see the scam for what it is. I have been arguing for over a decade for "illegals" rights against provincial racist fucks who wouldn't know a good, empathic, let's-stop-this-shit-now idea if I hit them with it. I have argued ENDLESSLY with people about treating people who are doing work for them to be more kind, understand the situation and ADMIT that it has been POLICY to let these people "in" for the profit these racist fucks so desire as investors in shit. They only see the brown of their skin and the difference of language. You see, I am the idiot. They only see borders and rules that can always be bent to their affluent ways.

I wasn't a dick. I pleaded with various anti immigrant groups years ago (one in Long Island), over email, to please be kind and understand the situation these people are in. All I got was a barrage of threats and insults. But see, I work in an industry that employs "illegals" and many of them are very long time friends of mine. I consider them family and I like to think they think the same of me. It just fucking sucks.

[Canadian_watcher]

Fa la la la laaa, la la la la ...
Deck the halls with boughs o' folly.

I am an educated and informed and mature person. I am thoughtful and respectful of all of our differences. I've been poor. I've been a virtual hobo, and now I work for the capital 'm' Man (and hate every second of it) .
I've been a rebel - put in the holding tank for my share of outrages to (but not outright breakages of) the law. Been the oppressor, (theoretically, that is - in my roles as a parent and an employer) and I've most definitely been the oppressed.

I love this forum. You all are some smart cookies.

All that being said I have to disagree in a major way with what I perceive to be a few 'gang forces' here on the board.

A couple are elements of what I perceive to be peer pressure induced agreement to a common theme, and a couple other I attribute to the proponents either never having walked a mile in certain shoes OR maybe just a difference of opinion.

Here they are, in random order:

Knee-jerk dismissal of Alex Jones
Knee-jerk, VEHEMENT acceptance of illegal immigration into the US
The idea that women are to blame for our over-sexualized culture
That controlled demolition is some kind of side issue.

I may not be up on the definition of 'woo' and I've never EVER used the word meme. I can't tell you Aleister Crowley's life story and I don't think I've even seen a hard copy of anything written by HG Wells or Lovecraft.

But I'm not an idiot, and I resent the tone of this board when anyone dares to speak about the aforementioned BIG 4 topics.

/rant

[American Dream]

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

I'm neither for nor against illegal immigration into the U.S., per se. It's all about the big picture. I am however for the undocumented immigrants that I know- they are human beings after all, and good ones at that.

I don't think that that women are to blame for our over-sexualized culture.

I do think that controlled demolition is pretty much of a side issue.


That said, other people are entitled to have other opinions (and they do) though I'm not very interested in participating in a 15 page flame war about it all...


Anyway:

[Canadian_watcher]

AD - neither am I. seriously. That was kind of roll-up-the-sleeves 'cause I'm in a fightin mood, huh?

apologies for that.

[norton ash]

Knee-jerk dismissal of Alex Jones
Knee-jerk, VEHEMENT acceptance of illegal immigration into the US
The idea that women are to blame for our over-sexualized culture
That controlled demolition is some kind of side issue.

I don't see it so much. I think we just disagree. A few people ride blinkered hobbyhorses, sometimes we get emotional, some folks will never yield, some debates are eternal. Some people like to needle and joke, and some get mean. Leave the table and talk to someone else. Some of us like to lift our heads just long enough to blurt something.

Like any gin joint or faculty lounge. Dreadful fun!

So what'll it be... the frozen head of Teddy Ballgame, or Israel-Palestine? We've got all night.

[JackRiddler]

Knee-jerk dismissal of Alex Jones

My rejection of Alex Jones is very well-considered thank you, and I'll brag and dare you to challenge me on my own assertions (and not misrepresentations thereof).

Knee-jerk, VEHEMENT acceptance of illegal immigration into the US

Again, for my part, I am not "vehement" but I believe altogether rational, not in "accepting" "illegal" immigration, but in understanding that the problems of jobs and wages attributed to immigrants are in no way caused by them, and that the way to solve these problems is to ally with them in the fight for better conditions for all (and an end to NAFTA and the maqiladora system), and that the way to make these problems WORSE by far is to attack them (since, as above, the exploitation of them and the "natives" is based on keeping them "illegal").

The idea that women are to blame for our over-sexualized culture

Well, I'd be way on the opposite side of that one. Just point me at any fool saying this, and I'll kick his ass for you in the most chivalrous tradition. If you'd like. Men are monsters, I say as a crown witness. By the way, I figure Alex would be on the other side of me on this one, so are you contradicting yourself indirectly?

That controlled demolition is some kind of side issue.

It is. On its own it will never prove anything. A coherent 9/11 skepticism can be formulated without CD, whereas CD (assuming it's even true, a big big IF) will never produce anything without a coherent 9/11 skepticism around it. And anyway, we lost, thanks very much to Alex and his talk-radio opportunist ilk, almost as much as to the 9/11 Commission and the media herd. The "movement" succeeded in raising attention to some of the issues, and then failed. 9/11 truth and justice may yet come due to unexpected developments (revelations from within the beast, whistleblowers, new botched plots, etc.), but not because of CD or anything else the former "movement" does. Only those fully wrapped up in the CD church don't see that.

Um, can you explain to me how these four ideas are related to the point where you see a gang fight around them as a single coherent connected set?

[Simulist]

Well, I was going to say all that (and not nearly as well, I am quite sure), but Jack beat me to it.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Knee-jerk, VEHEMENT acceptance of illegal immigration into the US

Fuck the US.

They stole that land from Mexico in the first place. Then they screwed Mexico for 100 years and now they are tearing the place apart cos they won't legalise drugs in the US.

That land has been part of those people's "country" for a long bloody time.

Plus this:

[JackRiddler]

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

Rat poison is about 4% rat poison. Kills you just the same.

[JackRiddler]

Knee-jerk, VEHEMENT acceptance of illegal immigration into the US

Fuck the US.

They stole that land from Mexico in the first place. Then they screwed Mexico for 100 years and now they are tearing the place apart cos they won't legalise drugs in the US.

That land has been part of those people's "country" for a long bloody time.

Well the truth is the Mexicans stole it first. Except they consorted more liberally with the indigenes, so they became indigenous far more than the upright Puritan white folk.

Anyway:



But it wasn't really paradise, whoever was having a war with whoever, therefore whatever we do is good (and what they do is bad!!!).