Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. "Your New World Order will fall!" he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. "Humanity will defeat you!"
A syndicated radio host, filmmaker, and all-around countercultural icon based in Austin, Texas, Jones has long been one of the country’s most significant purveyors of paranoia. His 2007 documentary Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, in which the megaphone scene takes place, purports to reveal a eugenics-obsessed global elite bent on eliminating most of the earth’s population and enslaving the rest. Members of a Satanic international network, Jones explains in an ominous voiceover, have been "steering planetary affairs for hundreds of years. Now, in the final stage, they prepare for open world government." And, in a line that would later echo among tea party protesters nationwide, he says, "The answer to 1984 is 1776!”
Though Jones has always had impassioned fans, until recently, he has remained a quintessentially marginal figure. A leader of the 9/11 Truth movement--he’s listed as an executive producer on the final cut of Loose Change, a documentary at the movement’s center--Jones claims to have uncovered the interconnected plots behind the JFK assassination, water fluoridation, and the recent economic crisis. He has accused the Illuminati of putting its symbols in the Starbucks logo as a taunting show of strength. Ron Paul is a frequent guest on his radio show, and Jones, who also runs a website called RonPaulWarRoom.com, has been a major supporter of the Ron Paul movement. One of his highest-profile guests was Lou Dobbs--Jones calls him one of his "idols"--who appeared on the show in March 2008; the two discussed ostensible plans to merge the United States into a supranational "North American Union" with Mexico and Canada.
But it’s really only since Barack Obama’s election, when Jones turned the full force of his apocalyptic imagination toward the new president, that his ideas have found purchase in the conservative mainstream. Several Republican officeholders, from state representatives to congressmen, have appeared on his program to trade wild theories about Obama. Glenn Beck has brought his fear-mongering about the New World Order to network television, and an online Fox News show collaborated with him on a joint broadcast.
To be sure, sundry leftists, as well as some Hollywood types, appear on Jones’s show, as well. Dennis Kucinich and Noam Chomsky have both been on. It’s where actor Charlie Sheen goes to spout his 9/11 Truth theories. But left-wing craziness tends to stay sequestered on the fringes of politics, while the right-wing fringe increasingly is the Republican mainstream. According to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, only 37 percent of Republicans believe that Obama was born in the United States. Jones has become politically salient because much of the right is as unhinged as he is.
Alex Jones speaks in capital letters, every word ringing with hypnotic urgency. His four-hour weekday radio broadcast, airing online and on some 60 stations nationwide, begins with the Star Wars Darth Vader theme, and his opening monologues resound with science-fictional melodrama. "This transmission is absolutely essential," began a typical dispatch on September 10, 2009. "All the different pieces of the puzzle are now coming together." He then seesawed between the plausible and the insane: an Israeli attack on Iran may be in the offing; Girl Scouts are being trained as fascist spies; the dollar is falling; the government plans to round up the citizenry and shoot them in the back of the head.
Passionately isolationist and antiZionist, his radio program and websites, infowars.com and prisonplanet.com, occupy the shadowy territory where the far right curves around and meets the far left. "People on left-wing blog sites are constantly recommending him," says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that monitors right-wing movements. Berlet says he often gets e-mails from would-be leftists saying, "You’re such an idiot. You should listen to Alex Jones."
Nevertheless, Jones’s roots are very much on the far right. He represents an old strain of American conservatism--isolationist, anti-Wall Street, paranoid about elite conspiracies--that last flowered during the John Birch Society’s heyday. He began his radio broadcasting career in 1996, in his early twenties, with the Austin-based show "The Final Edition," which promulgated all sorts of black-helicopter theories about Bill Clinton. Steeped in the rhetoric of the militia movement, he’s long been a champion of Randy Weaver, the white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in 1992 by federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. (He’s asserted that the people behind Ruby Ridge and Waco were also behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings--"Clinton’s Reichstag.")
Unlike most Clinton-haters, Jones (who didn’t respond to interview requests) hated George W. Bush just as much. To him, both Democrats and Republicans are puppets of the same set of rapacious moneymen who have hatched the New World Order conspiracy. So, when the World Trade Center was attacked again in 2001, Jones didn’t hesitate to blame the government for what he saw as an atrocity perpetrated by the global elites in their drive to enslave the world’s population.
Intellectual rigor. Honest reporting. Influential analysis. Don't miss another issue of the magazine considered "required reading" by the world's top decision-makers. Subscribe today.
COMMENTS (5)
I know I should cease to be appalled by the increasing lunacy and intellectual dishonesty of the "conservative" movement, but each day they manage to plumb new depths.
I know I should cease to be appalled by the increasing lunacy and intellectual dishonesty of the "conservative" movement, but each day they manage to plumb new depths.
Willie Nelson is a Truther?! Bummer.
Willie Nelson is a Truther?! Bummer.
The difference is, Jones actually believes what he's saying, hence he goes after Democrats and Republicans and continues to be antiwar. The Republicans don't really believe it, it's just that absent any leadership, they have to unite in hate against Obama, so they're reaching for something, anything, including conspiracy theories. From the post 9/11 to 2006 period they defined themselves as the national security party, with the warm, fuzzy family values. Now, since Mccain's "Country First" campaign got clobbered, they've pretty much given up on the national security card in favor of post-Joe the Plumber "socialism!", and while they still get the religious right, there's nothing warm about i ... view full comment
The difference is, Jones actually believes what he's saying, hence he goes after Democrats and Republicans and continues to be antiwar. The Republicans don't really believe it, it's just that absent any leadership, they have to unite in hate against Obama, so they're reaching for something, anything, including conspiracy theories. From the post 9/11 to 2006 period they defined themselves as the national security party, with the warm, fuzzy family values. Now, since Mccain's "Country First" campaign got clobbered, they've pretty much given up on the national security card in favor of post-Joe the Plumber "socialism!", and while they still get the religious right, there's nothing warm about it anymore (ie the nastiness of Mike Huckabee).
Their strategists have admitted that they're trying to imitate some of the left's protest tactics with the teabagger rallies/town hall shout downs. Maybe they think conspiracy theories will catch on with the young, whom they've alienated completely. Dream on.
One of the things that makes it hard to fight the growth in insane paranoia is the fact that there IS a super-rich, elite class, global in scope and interests, that exerts out-sized influence, if not control, over governments and communications (to varying degrees depending on the country). A class that perceives its best interests as diverging sharply from or in conflict with the interests of everybody else (the mass of middle class and poor). They ARE naturally anti-democratic and routinely intent on using their economic and political power to limit the political impact of the many who dwell outside their elite economic circles. Of course, in many ways this has always been so -- but modern ... view full comment
One of the things that makes it hard to fight the growth in insane paranoia is the fact that there IS a super-rich, elite class, global in scope and interests, that exerts out-sized influence, if not control, over governments and communications (to varying degrees depending on the country). A class that perceives its best interests as diverging sharply from or in conflict with the interests of everybody else (the mass of middle class and poor). They ARE naturally anti-democratic and routinely intent on using their economic and political power to limit the political impact of the many who dwell outside their elite economic circles. Of course, in many ways this has always been so -- but modern democracies have, from time to time, to a greater or lesser extent, managed to moderate the economic elite's outsized influence and generally negative economic and political impact on, and exploitation of, the population at large.
The nuttiness inspired by people's very accurate perception that they have been and are being screwed over makes me despair -- I'm sure Goldman, Citibank, GM, various fraud perpetuating military contractors, etc. are happy to see masses of people obsessing over, and diverted by fear of, the Illuminati, lizard people, satanist, etc., while they raid the public treasury -- but frankly maybe that's really how it's always been. Maybe the only way plutocracies ever get brought under control is when they (plutocratic elites), rather than others, realize some ill effects from their actions. When they discover that the mass consumer market they destroyed by destroying jobs and supressing wages really is needed to maintain their wealth or when the government treasury, that they refused to contribute to while using it to help bail them out of their woes and maintain their wealth, is finally depleted. Maybe then it will occur to them that the welfare of the rest of humanity may have some bearing on their own fortunes.
Meanwhile, the disturbing thing about the nutty paranoia we see all around us right now is that it seems likely, potentially, to provoke violence against scapegoats rather than to inspire needed reform. One worries about the innocent and the powerless eventually becoming targets of unfocused or misfocused rage. While the genuinely powerful continue to abuse their power with impunity. Frankly, I think today's super-rich are too geographically diverse and well protected by their extraordinary, unprecedented wealth to fear personal harm from revolution and social unrest among the masses. Our only hope may be that they personally start reaping some serious economic consequences from their selfishness -- and therefore themselves see the wisdom of some reform.
will someone please give me a plausible explanation for how building 7 came down? i don't want to be a truther anymore. the social costs are too high.
will someone please give me a plausible explanation for how building 7 came down? i don't want to be a truther anymore. the social costs are too high.