I just wanted to share this YouTube video with everyone. I don’t know if many here follow Alex Jones (I don’t…I recall a lot from him in the 9/11 CT threads which is all I really knew about him in the past, plus this segment from John Oliver on the man), but the guy is pretty entertaining. It’s amazing to me that anyone actually takes this guy seriously.
Anyway, just thought I’d share.
The problem is that a lot of people actually take him seriously (apparently more seriously than he takes himself), and the list of decision makers influenced by him include the current US President. He may be overacting in a bizarre attempt to top John Belushi’s most hyperbolic performance but he is convincing a lot of other people, including voters and powerful elected officials to believe in utterly baseless conspiracy theories about some deep shadow government orchastrating tragedies like the September 11, 2001 attacsk or the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
He is a dangerous, demogoguery-promoting fabulist who played no small part in influencing the 2016 election and the cottage industry of conspiranoia that has become de rigeuer among the xenophobic far right wing of the Republican party.
Stranger
Considering that he’s gone into court saying “no, no, I’m just an entertainer” to try to get custody of his kids or out of lawsuits, it’s amazing anyone believes anything he says.
But this is America, where you get to be terminally stupid and believe charlatans like him if you want to. 
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You’d think that the fact that he is trying to sell (outrageously priced) ‘cures’ or fixes for the problems he has supposedly found (and that all of them seem to be the worst kind of snake oil or new age horseshit) would be a dead give away to people that the guy is a total charlatan, but apparently, the bullshit detectors some folks have are faulty. Really not a huge surprise, considering enough people were taken in by Trump to make him president. :eek:
I think a big part of his success is that he will spread CTs that hit both the extreme right (anti-government, anti-democrats, anti-“New World Oder” type stuff) and the extreme left (anti-vaccine, 9/11 truther, chemtrails) so he hits that sweet spot where the crazies come full circle and meet.
I’ve watched several of those hour long Alex Jones compilation videos. The man is wildly entertaining and has a way with words. Totally nuts of course, but you’ll be hard pressed to find better comedy material. Some of his impassioned pleas for humanity to wake up, shake off their chains, and embrace their destiny in the stars are actually rather inspiring.
His entire worldview would make a good fantasy series or video game. He thinks the elite want to reduce the world population via chemicals in the food, water, and air, by pushing the gay lifestyle and attacking marriage, as well as provoke conflict until there’s an all out genocide. Why? Because they’re following the commands of an interdimensional demonic force. The elite, in their vanity, think they will join with robot bodies and live forever (hence their techno futurism), but what will actually happen is that Satan will ensnare their souls and use the machines to, if I remember right, assault heaven and destroy God’s plans. Or something like that? The demons need humans to make the machines, because demons can’t create, only corrupt (sounds like LOTR).
These are some of my favorite, less widely disseminated Alex Jones quotes.
He really doesn’t like Hillary:
You mean such as his promotion of the ‘Pizzagate’ purported child sex ring conspiracy which resulted in the owner and employees of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant (and other nearby establishments) being threatened and culimating in Edgar Maddison Welch deciding to “self-investigate” by entering the restaurant with an AR-15 and firing several times (fortunately not injuring anyone in the process). He’s less “wildly entertaining” encouraging people to “embrace their destinty” than inciting deeply disturbted wingnuts into harmful action, notwithstanding the influence he has with the current political leadership of the Oval Office.
Stranger
Jordan Klepper’s Comedy Central show The Opposition is a parody of Alex Jones in the way that Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report was a parody of Bill O’Reilly.
Colbert has a recurring segment parodying Jones on his new show as Tuck Buckford.
The Opposition has been getting better, with Klepper managing Colbert’s earlier feat of saying lunatic things while simultaneously undercutting them. He has a bunch of “citizen journalists” whose segments are usually pretty funny, better than most of those on The Daily Show.
Tuck Buckford is wildly over-the-top, trying to out-crazy the professionals. It occasionally succeeds but you really can’t outcrazy Jones.
I’ve noticed that when Stefan Molyneux talks with Alex he (involuntarily?) adopts some of Alex’s mannerisms.
Yeah, Pizzagate was screwed up. So was people harassing Sandy Hook parents. So is Qanon. Reality, online wingbattery, Trump, America’s decline – it’s all merging together into a vortex of insanity and things will only get worse from here on out. Some laugh, others cry.
While I have your attention, do you have any thoughts on this post?
Let’s go through this a bit:
Assuming he’s talking about the massacre survivors, this is the Crisis Actor Conspiracy Theory. It’s absolutely nothing new from Alex Jones, he does it literally every time there’s a mass shooting or a big bombing or something: All of the supposed “victims” are crisis actors, and you can tell because they re-use the same people every single time and Alex Jones fans are incapable of telling one brown-haired White person from another brown-haired White person.
To give some idea of how long he’s been using this gag, I remember first coming across it in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing. He claimed someone with bloody stumps for legs was really an amputee in Hollywood makeup.
Moving on.
I’m sure those ads have been there for years, and Alex Jones, despite how he likes to paint himself as a brave outsider, is hardly an unknown. If those companies had ever cared, they would have known over a decade ago.
This, however:
Comedy fucking gold. Alex Jones and his merry band think the UN is a Globalist Plot to set up FEMA Death Camps and force White nations to accept African refugees. Heck, they even have a nice little slogan: “Anti-racist is code for anti-White.”
Alibaba is Chinese. They couldn’t possibly give fewer shits about looking not-crazy to Americans.
And given how much play the victims of that hoax got when the conspiratards began harassing them, there’s no way the companies didn’t know about Alex Jones and what he does.
This is evidence of a shift in the culture. First, companies pivoting away from the NRA, now, companies investigating YouTube over right-wing extremists monetizing videos using their ads. It’s only going to continue from here.
Alibaba is an online storefront for several companies, one of which I’ve dealt with. They’re sort of China’s version of Amazon; they should give a shit about looking not-crazy to a large portion of potential customers.
Maybe I’m just parochial, but I’ve heard of them being huge in China, but I’ve never heard of them having much presence in the US.
Unlike Amazon, they don’t have any regional sites (e.g.: amazon.co.uk) so all their business goes though China. Pretty sure their customer base is almost entirely resellers such as Oriental Trading Company but it’s not all wholesale.
Crazy people seem to be about a third of the US market, and probably easier to squeeze a dollar out of - because they’re dumb. So the hard-headed economic calculation may still come down on the side of advertising to them.
Wondering if you defend his right to be heard or do you feel he should be censored?
What is the purpose of asking this question? You already know the answer that will be given in advance–what is it you’re hoping to accomplish by eliciting that answer?