IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, six weeks before the 9/11 attacks, a twenty-seven-year-old national radio host warned his listeners to wake up, imploring and beseeching them. “Please call Congress,” he said. “Tell ’em we know the [Bush administration] is planning terrorism.” He mentioned the World Trade Center—and Osama bin Laden, who was not yet famous. “Bin Laden is the bogeyman they need in this Orwellian, phony system.” He called George W. Bush “the bipartisan imperialist elite’s front man.” He later executive-produced a documentary explaining that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job by the U.S. government.
He’s still around, ragging on the military-industrial complex (“sending troops to die in illegal wars”), the horrors of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, the Bilderberg Group (“the apex of the…power structure”), Goldman Sachs, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, corporate America in general (“Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism”). He has been a supporter of Edward Snowden. In an on-air conversation with Noam Chomsky, a towering intellectual avatar of the far left, the men agreed that the elite imposes an illusion of consent on the people, that U.S. elections are mostly meaningless, that the Democrats and Republicans (as Chomsky remarked) are really just “two factions of one party.” During the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, he said that the National Guard was “clearly being given orders to brutalize the press…and to threaten to kill the press.” “You’re one of the only prominent leaders,” he told Louis Farrakhan during their conversation in 2016, “that addresses that there is a conspiracy…[of] the power elite.”
“We’re on the march,” he says again and again, the way Henry V said unto the breach, “and the empire is on the run.” So who is this overwrought left-winger with an influential radio program syndicated on a hundred stations, live online TV shows beaming out for hours a day, eighteen YouTube channels (one of which has more than a billion views), a website with more traffic than lots of big daily newspapers? Why, that’s no left-winger, it’s Alex Jones, routinely described as “conservative” because he rants against gun regulation, government-subsidized healthcare, and taxes. Populist? Alt-right? Crypto-nihilist? Our language simply hasn’t kept up with the new permutations.
He is the very epitome of cutting-edge political discourse, where outright fiction is presented and consumed as nonfiction. What’s more, he’s no longer a fringe freak; he’s a freak who has both a huge following and the ear of the president of the United States...
...Donald Trump appeared on Alex Jones’s show as a candidate and, right after the election, according to Jones, phoned him. “He said, ‘Listen Alex, I just talked to the kings and queens of the world, world leaders, you name it, but…I wanted to talk to you….We know what you did early on, throughout this campaign.’ ”
“It shows he’s not the average elitist,” Jones continued, still jazzed from his conversation with the president-elect,
these stuck-up nobodies who believe they control the world, who believe everybody’s an idiot…the people who tell you you have absolutely no rights or freedoms….They stole five states on November 8th but still lost. And this whole criminal multinational enterprise…is now coming down….We finally have people in Washington that…don’t buy the propaganda of the big mainline corporations that are using weaponized media to mind-control simple-minded people….Once we restore the fact that it’s okay for men to be masculine in America and defeat this big Ford Foundation program…people will become humans again and will be free….[Trump won] because a lot of patriots, the Pentagon and you name it were part of the research program to carry this out—it was so horrifying they finally said, “No, we’re not gonna do this to these people, we’re not gonna turn them into cowardly jellyfishes.” Your hoaxes did not work on us!
Fantasyland How America Went Haywire- A 500-Year History
Kurt Andersen
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