Inside the mind of Alex Jones
An otherwise obscure American radio host, Alex Jones made himself both famous and infamous in recent years with his claim that the story of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was a hoax.
The weeping parents of 20 allegedly murdered children and their teachers, the police on the scene, the traumatized kids who narrowly escaped — they were lying, they were all actors, and so were the reporters who recounted this on TV and in print. Everybody was in on the scam. It was a government conspiracy aimed at promoting gun control to deprive the citizens of their constitutional right to bear arms. What a scoop!
Classical conspiracy theories take precisely this form. They must be outlandish. They never fail to strain the credulousness of their intended audience. To believe in Holocaust denial, for example, you must accept that many thousands of victims, armies of historians and uncountable witnesses were all in on the game and have never once revealed the secret.
The imagination of a dedicated conspiracy addict is limitless. And yet, over and over this feat of willing acceptance is repeated. In 1963, John Kennedy’s assassination became the seedbed for a vast literature dedicated to proving that the U.S. government killed him and somehow kept the crime a secret, putting the blame on the nerdish Lee Harvey Oswald. Flights of alien airships from beyond our galaxy circle the earth, stopping here and there to abscond with our DNA — and the U.S. government again keeps this phenomenon a dark secret. The landing of Americans on the moon was another hoax, just a lot of television shots hoked up in an old warehouse in San Diego.
When these fantasies spread, they must proliferate for a reason. They must answer a need many people f eel, consciously or not. What they offer is a way of fixing the blame for an undesirable event. Donald Trump, when he was trying to win a purchase on the American imagination, proposed that China was a major reason for American unemployment. It seemed logical, for those who didn’t follow the news with much care, that the wily Chinese had stolen American jobs — and much American money as well.
Since taking office, Trump has seldom mentioned this problem that seemed so crucial a year or so in the past. Perhaps someone told him that capitalism had eliminated jobs when it devised ways of having them filled by robots. Capitalism is complicated and much supported. Unlike China, it is not obviously blameworthy.
When Megyn Kelly invited Jones onto her NBC show he turned out to be less than sure of his story about Sandy Hook. Faced with hard questions, in fact, he collapsed. He said he realized now that “children probably did die there.” Even so, he sees why some people still believe that it was all a scam.
Imaginary conspiracies are sometimes amusing but they are also terrifying. Adolf Hitler became a dictator by claiming persuasively that Jews were responsible f or everything wrong in Germany. And in America during the early years of the Cold War Joe McCarthy cast a pall over the whole country by claiming it was infested by secret communists. They were both skilled conspiracy manipulators.
But the Jones website, Infowars. com, which brought this process forward in recent days, is a lot about nothing. It’s headed, “There’s a war on for your mind!” but after that grim warning it simply collects stories from the Mainstream Media, the dreaded MSM that everyone in the conspiracy business disdains and distrusts. “Dem losing streak continues as party becoming a joke” is one featured story. Another is “Demonstrations could turn violent in London.”
For centuries, humanity has been throwing up conspiracies that threaten to take over large sections of the world. The Illuminati ( meaning “enlightened ones”) were said to be a secret society of the 18th century and for a while were blamed by conservatives for the French Revolution. The Freemasons have been accused of dominating certain professions, such as law, and, like the Illuminati, are said to hold secret power even yet. People claiming to be in touch with the Illuminati said they were planning to shut down the Internet on March 31, 2017.
On the Internet, various conspiracy theories are proposed and then abandoned. The Khazarian mafia is said to be making plans that will eventually lead to World War III. Recently, a well- known conspiracy monger found himself compelled to deny, online, the “ridiculous” accusation that he had been replaced by a clone. Actually, he was just taking a break.
The American political scientist Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy, claims theories rely on three principles. “Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.” Conspiracy theories evolve to incorporate whatever evidence exists against them. They become a closed system, unfalsifiable, fundamentally a matter of faith.