Category Archives: Alternative Media
Alex Jones: Conspiracy Crank or Captain America?
Where the Birchers and others on the intellectual (versus the delusional neocon) spectrum of the right get it wrong is that they misinterpret the work of the influential historian Carroll Quigley , especially in the seminal Tragedy and Hope. In the book, his masterpiece Quigley writes of the behind the scenes power elite behind the curtain influence of ’round table’ groups that gather in secret and exert their influence over the publicly visible elements of the state. The Birchers and Cleon Skoussen, who is an idol of Glenn Beck (who pimps Skoussen’s manifesto The Five Thousand Year Leap) get it wrong with Quigley in interpreting the work as referring to global communism and socialism as the New World Order when in fact the groups that Quigley wrote about were primarily agents of global finance capital, the same global bankers that Jones so often condemns. Quigley himself disputed the interpretation of Tragedy and Hope by Skoussen who incidentally was an early member of the Council For National Policy. The problem with these types of analyses is that they too often focus on the influence of the old Eastern establishment, transnational types, particularly the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission but at the same time pay no mind to the influential role of the powerful interests that rose out of the western states and the sunbelt, primarily big energy and defense, the new money. While I agree with them to some extent about the dangers of the rising police state bent on human enslavement through debt, global government (although corporate is conveniently omitted) and in the case of the Rockefellers and the other big wheels, the creation of a system of control that as Jones and others extrapolate to include embedded microchips (this is coming folks) and a taste for eugenics (Hitler got his ideas from the American elite) and ultimately a massive culling that will lead to the depopulation of the planet. What I take issue with is the idea that the threat from the “globalists” pales in comparison to that posed by their U.S. counterparts, particularly emanating out of the Council For National Policy and the predominant influence of powerful Evangelical Christians who have slowly and largely off the radar hijacked the American political system and to a good extent elements of the military. Not a good thing when a cancerous anti-Muslim/Islam bent is eating the country from within as a cancer, when bankrupting wars of imperial conquest are ongoing in Muslim countries and the crusader mentality is encouraged. The war of civilizations plays directly into the ideology of tens of millions of American Evangelicals hellbent on seeing the apocalypse in their lifetime so that they can be Raptured up to sit at the foot of God’s throne while the rest of us eat each other. This is very scary stuff and whenever any of it seeps out as to the religious motivations behind the wars the messenger must instantly be discredited, note the brutal pillorying of Seymour Hersh over a recent speech when he spoke of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), the Knights of Malta and the deeply entrenched Christian crusader mentality in the military. But Jones doesn’t go there which is one very serious problem that I have with him, he is not covering the BIG picture only selective elements, all of which are compatible with the Council For National Policy agenda.
Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone piece references the influence of the John Birch Society on a young Alex Jones:
Home life was intellectual, but not overtly political. “My parents were careful not to give me political views almost as an experiment to see what I’d turn into,” he says. “The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society. They’d come over for dinner and I’d be exposed to those ideas, starting at around age two.”
And
The most enduring influence, though, was a 1971 bestseller he found on his father’s bookshelf: None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Authored by Gary Allen, a spokesman for the John Birch Society, the book provided the cornerstone for New World Order conspiracies. According to None Dare, the federal income tax is nothing but a plot by a cabal of megarich “insiders” who work to suck the middle class dry and transfer its wealth to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. As a teenager, Jones read the book twice. “It’s still the easiest-to-read primer to the New World Order,” he says.
Hey, it’s not that the Birchers are bad people; they are for the most part loudly pro-American patriots, they just have a different view on many things but to ignore the fact that despite their more outrageous histrionics there is much common ground on a good many issues of great importance. I have myself on several occasions worked jointly with the organization on issues of agreement and unlike say MoveOn.org or other political action groups, I always get a return letter from my so-called Congressional representatives when using the JBS activism tools. Like all organizations, they continue to evolve but their focus on communism as the ultimate menace was and is wrong and is reflective of the formation of the JBS during the Cold War era when paranoia first became a virtue in America although of life as it is post 9/11 . For the record though, the JBS in it’s current incarnation is far more outspoken and progressive on civil liberties issues than either the Bush or Obama administrations. It is just that they are misguided and far too overly concerned with the external threats than those that are internal and have overwhelmed the traditional, reality-based conservatism of the past.
As for civil liberties this is where Alex Jones is the most effective, in attacking the vile transformation of what used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave into some bastardized version of Oceania, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany called The Homeland.There is no more of a passionate and ardent defender of American civil liberties on air than Alex Jones, and truthfully that sucks because it is due to problematic and uncompromising stances on such issues as illegal immigration abortion (Jones is against it), failing to denounce the Tea Party movement after it had obviously been infiltrated and compromised by Neocon Republicans, Koch Brothers style global warming denial and a certain dark xenophobia relating to Mexicans (he accused Grindhouse spin-off flick Machete director Robert Rodriguez of fomenting a race war) he would have such crossover appeal that he would become a very dangerous man to the oligarchy. The one thing that this pathetically impotent, broken down and busted out lemming colony desperately needs (absent a functional political system) is a libertarian – progressive-green alliance that could find enough common ground to pose a serious and highly motivated threat to the current corrupt system. Jones, a libertarian who is a huge supporter of the former insurgent Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, a man whose anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties, anti-torture, anti-Federal Reserve and pro-America views make him anathema to the Neocon controlled GOP has gained much clout with thinking progressives for his principled stance on what ails America. Paul recently joined with the hated bogeyman of establishment Democrats, Ralph Nader in an alliance against the corporate warfare state so there is potential. Were Jones to reign in his tirades in order to appeal to a wider audience and using his skills as a showman and filmmaker he would be formidable indeed.
The Rolling Stone piece is actually about as fair a bit of writing about a guy with the controversial nature of Alex Jones is going to get in a major American publication. Certainly not a cowardly knee-capping, the article portrays Jones’ family life as being very normal, he “dotes” on his wife and children, “cracks jokes with his young staff” and is according to the author “shockingly sincere” in everything that he says. And the article makes it a point to emphasize that Jones has no tolerance for racism (Obama Joker posters and unruly Meskins [sic] aside) and is against the sort of anti-Semitism that is exemplified in many of the more extreme elements of the far-right. With any attacks on the Neocons and their insatiable bloodlust for global hegemony often resulting in knee-jerk and libelous accusations of anti-Semitism from the normal William Kristol, Israel Lobby and Alan Dershowitz influenced winged-monkeys it is important that one be wary of being accused as being nothing more than a ‘Jew hater’. Zaitchik’s piece makes a point of mentioning that Jones’ wife is of Jewish descent and I have on occasion when listening to his show often heard him respond to callers (more than a few so over the top that they are likely some of those paid actors who read scripts on radio shows) denouncing Jews in a harsh manner, this is good currency to have considering the highly coordinated activist presence of movement conservatives. And as for the ultra-slick, multi-millionaire, fish-belly white faux populist spokesman for the corrupted beyond redemption Tea Party that is Glenn Beck, a followup bit on how Beck has stolen from Jones, changed the message to one of partisan politics and deception and helped to build a proto-fascist army of American brownshirts who with the help of the vast right-wing conspiracy network of think tanks, front groups and local bunds of haters that can be bussed in to any hotspots, like they were to Madison, Wisconsin during the rebellion against Governor Scott Walker.
Zaitchik (and likely the editors) does make more than a few of the standard tricks and tactics used to discredit those who dare to ask the forbidden questions as wingnut ‘tin foil hatters’. For instance the sly references to the diseased little monster Jared Loughner, Loughner is said to have been a fan of the 9/11 Truth film Loose Change, as if that sort of guilt by association with a film that dares to examine the American Reichstag Fire hasn’t been now viewed by tens of millions of people who don’t go on kill crazy rampages. Jones is mocked for daring to question the official story and to ponder whether the Arizona shootings were in fact a “government mind control operation”. There is of course no reference to the longtime involvement of the CIA and military in mind control experiments such as MKULTRA, the obsession with trying to create ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style assassins (reference the work of a Colonel Thomas Narut found in the out of print Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart), there is one hell of a lot of money that is spent on mind control and Jones understands that, even if the sheeple don’t. Also the article seems to state that Jones’ belief in FEMA camps, total government tracking and fusion centers is absurd. Of course there is no mention is given to the ACLU’s report on the fusion centers that are hidden in plain sight just about everywhere now, Oliver North’s REX 84, Continuity of Government or the existence of these bizarre sort of detention facilities in America. This stuff is real and people had better get it though whatever may remain of their television lobotomized brains that they are there for a reason, and it’s not going to be a good reason. Of course such facilities must be downplayed, the blockbuster episode of TruTv’s hit show Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura dealing with the fusion centers, detention camps and police state (which Jones contributed to) was yanked off of the air and flushed down the memory hole by the an oligarchy hellbent on concealing the truth for as long as possible while the police state or as Jones refers to it, “the global, Stasi,Borg state” can be fully completed.
Zaitchik also writes:
To Jones, what matters most is the “continuity of agenda at the top. When I called Clinton a Wall Street puppet, they called me a right-wing extremist. When I said the same about George W. Bush, they called me an anti-war communist. Now that I’m against Obama for the same reasons, mainline conservatives embrace me. When I attack the next right-wing ‘savior,’ they’re gonna call me a communist again.”
On the spiritual cancer of modern capitalism, Jones sounds more like Ralph Nader than a Fox Business channel libertarian. “Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives,” Jones says. “The globalists are smart and tell us sin is fun, sin is a red-devil cheerleader. No — sin is cheating other people, it’s sending troops to die in illegal wars, it’s keeping people dumb so you can control, exploit and kill them.”
It was in high school that Jones discovered a corrupt, Blue Velvet underbelly to his town. At weekend parties, he watched as off-duty cops dealt pot, Ecstasy and cocaine to his friends. “A truck would appear, sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside,” Jones recalls. “Then, on Monday, they’d have D.A.R.E. and drug-test us for football.” Jones, a young varsity lineman, did not appreciate the irony. “I was like, ‘You want to drug-test me, when I know you’re selling the stuff?’ I called them the mafia to their face. At the time, I didn’t know anything about CIA drug-dealing.”
Things came to a head during Jones’ sophomore year, when he was pulled over while driving without a license, a six-pack of beer under the passenger seat. Jones told the cop he was corrupt and had no right to enforce laws. “They brought me to jail,” Jones says. “Afterward, one of the cops told me to wise up, or they’d frame me and send me away.” The following week, his father was so spooked that he sold his dental practice and moved the family to Austin. A few months later, Rockwall County’s sheriff was indicted on organized-crime charges.
“Thus I looked at these repeated-rule breakings together under the rubric “war conspiracy,” a clumsy term which in retrospect could have been improved on. At the time I made it clear that I was not pointing to some single group of guilty plotters, but to a “syndrome” of sustained collusion and deceit. I likened the process to a “floating crap game”, in which the players (and dealers) change, but not the motive of gain. This analogy in retrospect seems absurdly linear. I had stumbled, almost by accident, on a far more pervasive process of subversion of public order. Today I talk instead of a dominant mindset, one found in various power centers: the military, intelligence agencies, the media, and even universities.
No doubt my analogy of a floating crap game could be characterized as an example of what Richard Hofstadter called “the conspiratorial mentally or ‘paranoid’ style – for which important events in public life are best understood as the product of hidden, malevolent forces in history. But what shall we say of those people, usually in privileged stations of the Establishment, for whom “conspiracy theory”, as Murray Rothbard once observed, is “quite beyond the pale of correct thinking and permissible discourse?” Is their preference for non-conspiratorial explanations not really a psychological tendency? “Lone-nutism,” the Establishment’s answer to “conspiracism” in the case of the Kennedy assassination, can be carried to spectacular lengths, as when Allen Dulles in the Warren Commission applied it to the simultaneous shootings accompanying the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.The obvious failing of comprehensive conspiracy theories which invoke a single “invisible government” is their tendency to attribute a wide spectrum of unrelated events to a single controller or group. Just consider the list of controllers that various authors have suggested: the Pinay Circle, the Safari Club, the Round Table, the Bilderberts, the Knights of Malta, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Jesuits, Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission, the American Security Council, the Mafia, to name only some. One ingenious writer has claimed that a Jesuit Freemason member of the Round Table inspired the Bilderberger meetings, where in turn David Rockefeller “broached the idea of a Trilateral Commission.” But even such a synoptic hypothesis will not begin to cover the disparate evidence of plural hidden forces at work.What all the aforementioned groups have in common is some degree of connection to what I call the global overworld – that fraction of the few hundred superrich (whose combined wealth is estimated by U.N. sources to nearly equal the annual income of the poorer half of the world’s population), and their representatives who also use wealth to exert political influence.
The Great American Lemming Farm 