Jones also popularized the idea that the government used weather weapons to geo-engineer, for example, Hurricane Irma and the 2013 Oklahoma tornado outbreak. Further, Bill Gates is a eugenicist, Lady Gaga's 2017 Super Bowl halftime show was a satanic ritual, and right-wing Fox News commentator Glenn Beck is a CIA plant.10
Jones dependably claims just about every mass shooting is a “false flag” event, including the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012. Similarly, according to Jones, James Holmes's 2012 attack in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater—which spawned the fake, media-trolling “Holmies” fan club—may have been the result of CIA mind control.
Jones also smelled something fishy when Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News Network and Matt Drudge's first staffer, died—Jones suggested that he may have been poisoned. Every time The Drudge Report linked to Jones's material, the possibility that these conspiracy theories weren't crazy got incrementally higher.
But the recent spread of conspiracy theories also owes a debt to the self-destructing mainstream media.
In late August 1968, Gore Vidal, then one of the most famous authors in America, called William F. Buckley, Jr., the leading man of the academic right, a “crypto-fascist” on live television. Suddenly enraged on the drab soundstage, Buckley shot back: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.”11
The two men, political opposites who deeply loathed one another, had been paired off by ABC News to debate the Republican and Democratic conventions. It was an experiment created out of desperation. ABC News lagged far behind NBC and CBS in ratings and couldn't afford the traditional full-time coverage of the conventions. Instead they presented daily debates between the two men, which resulted in verbal fireworks and, in this climax, a slur and threat of violence.
The debates were unlike anything anyone had seen before on television, an “intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news.”12 ABC gained a ratings boom with the debate model and the lesson for television executives was clear. As screenwriter Aaron Sorkin put it: “Incivility rates.”13
When Cable News Network (CNN) first went on air twelve years after the 1968 debates, its main focus was providing a constant stream of news—differentiating itself from the networks that had news only at certain times of the day. In 1996, a competitor, Fox News, began eating into CNN's market share with reporting and opinion shows slanted right.
That same year, MSNBC was also introduced to the cable-news market but languished in the rankings for almost a dozen years until networks executives began introducing more opinionated and openly left-leaning coverage. The strategy worked: Between 2008 and 2016, MSNBC began overtaking CNN in key audience metrics. By 2012, the New York Times was referring to the network as the “Anti-Fox.”14 The new lesson for news executives: “Partisanship rates.”
Those two elements—Vidal-Buckley-style shout fests, mixed with intense partisanship and large doses of opinion—have increasingly become the way Americans learn about the world. By 2016, 57 percent of Americans were getting their news from television, but—unlike in 1968—virtually equal numbers of people were watching cable TV versus the previously dominant network news.15
While the ratings formula may work, the disappearance of actual reporting from cable news is marked. According to a 2013 Pew research poll, CNN is the only of the three leading networks to broadcast more reporting than opinion and commentary. Right-leaning Fox's programming was 55 percent opinion while left-leaning MSNBC's broadcast content was 85 percent opinion-based.16
Additionally, as cable news networks created visions of the world that were not just different from each other but in stark opposition, they fed off of and fomented the same angry dynamic as the political parties for which they increasingly acted as appendages. In January 2016, a poll by NBC and Esquire found that the news made 67 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans angry at least once a day.17
In the 1990s, Fox News created a broadcast model premised on, as author David Neiwert puts it, coaching “half of America to hate the other half.”18 By 2008, that dynamic had accelerated two-fold. MSNBC realized it could stake out a place in the massive American market simply by positioning itself as the opposite of Fox. For the rest of President Obama's term, over two-thirds of the cable news ecosystem was controlled by two channels belittling or contradicting the opinions of the other. During the Obama administration, according to a biography of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, “the right-wing media and the Republican Party started to fuse into this single entity.”19
The roughly 38 percent of Americans primarily getting their news online were subject to an even more partisan and fact-free zone. Both left-leaning websites like Daily Kos, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post, and right-tilting sites like The Drudge Report, Daily Caller, and The Blaze tended toward skewed partisan bias or even lies.20
All this bickering and transparent partisanship led the sources of news for the majority of Americans to suffer the same fate as the nation's political parties. Following 2008, the public's trust in television news—as well as other forms of mass media—plummeted. In 1976, following the Watergate exposé, Americans’ confidence in the media hit 72 percent. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was lower, but still stayed above 50 percent. By 2009, fewer than half of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. By 2016, that level of faith had plummeted to 32 percent.
Extremists and conspiracists have always attacked the media, established arbiters of truth, because it casts doubt on their own. David Lane lambasted the “JEWSMEDIA,” while Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and The Order founder Robert Jay Mathews called television “the Electronic Jew.” From 2008 onward, mainstream media's hostile and oppositional environment was creating confusion, anger, and historically low levels of trust. This dynamic was both a self-inflicted wound and a huge gift to conspiracists like Alex Jones.
One other unlikely stream fed into the decay of mainstream authority. At least since the 1960s, academics have been opening up, dismantling, and deconstructing meaning and narratives. Over the past several decades, the establishment of “identity politics, post-modernism, hollowness of meaning, polyphony of narratives, safe spaces et al became dominant.”21 Ironically, these efforts—long associated with the left and repeatedly lambasted by conservatives—have recently been most effectively employed by right-wing extremists. 4chan trolls and conspiracy theorists have taken quite happily to “undermining media agendas” and promoting “alternative narratives.”
Likewise, the literary criticism that became widespread in American universities in the 1980s argued that a text was open to multiple interpretations, there was no baseline truth. Again, conspiracy theorists ran with these ideas, but the result was not multiple truths in some sort of rigorous academic context. For better or worse, this academic critique was generally aimed at complicating or “problematizing” the truth.
Conspiracy theories do the opposite. They argue that mainstream reality is fake, flawed, or only one possibility, but then replace it with incredibly simplistic—if convoluted—explanation for the nature of reality. Alex Jones, for example, promotes theories that are both wild and incredibly predictable. Essentially, any major event, political figure or institution isn't what it seems, and it all links back to secret cabals running the world, trying to take away the docile, unaware masses’ liberties.
Despite all of Jones's success in claiming the mantle of the world's best-known conspiracy theorist, it's clear that he isn't always in control of the fantasy universe he's played such a large role in creating. In 2015, Jones challenged David Duke to a debate after Duke said Jones's claims about FEMA concentration camps were delusional. However, Jones was forced to delete the video of the interview after Duke received overwhelming support from not just his white supremacist base, but from Jones's own fan base.
The problem for Jones was that his ideas are so simil
ar in form to the anti-Jewish Protocols that he attracts people who then attack him for not being explicitly anti-Semitic enough. In fact, Jones, whose ex-wife is Jewish, has been labeled an Israeli agent and plagued on Twitter by the hashtag #jewwife.
Although he tries to avoid the most obvious anti-Semitism, Jones has made clear that “true patriots” need to violently resist encroachments on their freedoms. Unfortunately, several people who have listened or watched his shows and “documentaries” have adopted a Turner Diaries style of activism.
In 2010, Byron Williams engaged in a twelve-minute firefight with police in Oakland, California, after a traffic stop. Inspired in part by Jones, Williams was on his way to kill people at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and left-leaning Tides Foundation in San Francisco and start a right-wing revolution.
In 2011, an Idaho man, Oscar Ortega, traveled across country to assassinate President Obama. His inspiration: the Jones-written and produced The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off, which describes how the president worked with the New World Order by turning the US into Nazi Germany and imprisoning Americans in FEMA camps.
That same year, Jared Loughner killed six people including a nine-year-old girl at an event in Tucson, Arizona, in which US representative Gabby Giffords was speaking. (Giffords was nearly killed as well.) Loughner was a fan of the Jones-produced Loose Change, as well as the Zeitgeist trio of conspiracy films about the international monetary system that heavily borrowed ideas and examples from Jones.
In 2013, a family member of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev revealed that, in addition to jihadi sites, Tsarnaev took an interest in InfoWars. True to form, Jones claimed that the incident, which killed three runners and two police officers and injured 260 people, was an FBI plot.22
It would be incredibly simplistic and irresponsible to claim that conspiracy theories resulted in this violence. In most, if not all, of these cases, the perpetrators suffered from weakened inhibitors and strong destabilizers like anger or grievance. But the combination of psychological factors and angry, extremist ideas certainly played a significant role in creating the potential for violence directed at certain groups.
In the fall of 2016, Alex Jones—along with 4chan anons, certain reddit communities, and even future national security advisor Michael Flynn propagated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. Based on supposedly close readings of the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, the theory claimed that high-ranking Democratic Party officials, including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, were operating a sex ring involving minors. The theory, which became connected to a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, was a weird mix of trolling, pseudo-ironic humor, and hardcore conspiracy theory.
Nonetheless, Comet Ping Pong employees were harassed via social media and phones, even receiving death threats. Then, in December of 2016, Edgar Welch, a registered Republican from the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina, drove up to Washington, DC, to “self-investigate” these myths. Welch, who had no previous history of violence, entered the crowded restaurant with an AR-15 assault rifle and a .38 caliber handgun. After people fled through the back door, Welch fired three shots in the restaurant and began searching for the tunnels through which children were reportedly being smuggled.
Though Welch found no one and surrendered peacefully, this fantastic and violent intrusion into the real world wasn't over. Welch still refused to accept that the story wasn't true. More disturbingly, a poll taken two days after the shooting showed that nearly one in ten registered voters thought Pizzagate's claims were true—and one in five weren't sure.23
In other words, slightly fewer than fifty million registered US voters were either convinced or open to the idea that former first lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton was involved in a child-sex ring based out of pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. This incident revealed a nation that had gone beyond even the hyper-partisanship long practiced by both parties. Believing such a serious accusation without a shred of evidence is more akin to mass hallucination.
But it was also the result of a very specific combination of factors, all of them related to social media. Over the course of 2008–2016, this new media ecosystem overrun with conspiracy theories provided the unstable platform for the reemergence of some nearly forgotten extremist movements with long histories of violence.
Eighteen-year-old Aaron Dixon sat in the front row of his high-school auditorium while Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, delivered a fiery speech. Dixon, who had bought Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses just for the event, hung on Carmichael's every word. The well-known civil rights leader pushed past the mainstream rhetoric of the 1950s and early 60s. It was 1967: “We Shall Overcome” was out; “Black Power!” was in.
In his memoir My People Are Rising, Dixon remembers, “A slow current of anger began to brew inside me, and to my mind whites were now the cause of all the problems that Black people faced.”1
Dixon had grown up in a solid family in a segregated neighborhood in Seattle. His parents, who had relocated their family from Chicago to get away from the city's endemic crime, preached the importance of school and hard work. By 1967, Dixon was already politically and socially active. A few years earlier, he had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., to end housing segregation in Seattle. More recently, he had volunteered to be on the frontlines of integration, busing to the mostly white high school where Carmichael gave his speech.
As he sat in the auditorium amidst repeated shouts of “Black Power!,” Dixon was relatively well grounded, but new destabilizers, including anger, rebellion, and grievance, were strengthening. Like every other radicalization process, Dixon's would weave together personal traits and external forces. But, unlike many other examples in this book, his process would be driven by a pervasive, stifling sense that injustice was being visited upon African Americans.
The steady stream of violence on the television news over the past four years—the beatings of King and his nonviolent marchers, the assassinations of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy's murder, and devastating nightly reports from Vietnam—had been steadily eroding Dixon's faith in nonviolent approaches to changing the political establishment. Encountering Stokely Carmichael brought him face-to-face with an electric, charismatic force.
“I walked out of the auditorium transformed,” Dixon later wrote. “I was not the same person who had entered. From that day forward, I looked at the world and everyone around me with anger and rage.”2
A year later, the other shoe dropped. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated, deadly riots erupted in over a hundred cities across the country, and Carmichael called for black people to get guns to defend themselves. A few weeks later, Aaron Dixon formed the Seattle branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP).
The BPP had begun two years earlier in Oakland, California, to monitor police harassment of people in black neighborhoods. Armed citizen patrols trailed police through majority African American parts of the city with their guns in full view. When confronted by police, they claimed they had broken no laws and were merely exercising their rights under California's open-carry provisions.
The following year, the group exploded into the nation's consciousness after more than a dozen armed members entered the California State Assembly during debate over the Mulford Act, which would make open-carry illegal. The images of young black men with sunglasses, berets, leather jackets, and shotguns occupying the stately building was either terrifying or energizing, depending on who you were. It was also an amazing publicity coup.
The Panthers had expanded their local recruitment through social programs, like free breakfasts for kids and a community medical and legal aid center, but guns were central to their identity. Along with an ideology influenced by worldwide revolutionary Communist struggle—they bought some of their first firearms with money earned from selling copies of Communist leader Mao Zedong's Little Red Book—guns
were the single biggest difference between the rising black militancy of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the previous, emphatically nonviolent civil rights movement.
The BPP was also defined by its complex and violent relationship with law enforcement. When Dixon set up his Seattle branch in 1968, he emulated the Oakland Black Panthers’ modus operandi by providing what was normally law-enforcement and social-service functions in African American neighborhoods. Seattle Panthers provided a food pantry, resolved landlord and domestic disputes, engaged drug dealers to limit violence, and aggressively monitored Seattle's virtually all-white police force.
As in other cities, Seattle's Black Panthers soon migrated from watching law enforcement to replacing the police and government. Party members marched freely with weapons through the majority-black Madrona Hill. On the few occasions that the Seattle police came to the neighborhood, they never left their cars.3
The flip side of relatively peacefully replacing police was out-and-out warfare between the two groups. In 1968, two days after MLK was gunned down in Memphis, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, led two other party members in an armed ambush of Oakland police officers that resulted in two officers being injured. Cleaver himself was wounded and another Panther killed.
In November of 1969, a shootout between Black Panthers and Chicago police left two police officers and one party member dead. The next month, the Chicago police and the FBI raided the apartment of Illinois BPP leader Fred Hampton in the early morning, killing Hampton and member Mark Clark. The well-orchestrated attack on Hampton's apartment was alleged to be an orchestrated assassination by the Afro-American Patrolmen's League and the white mayor of nearby Maywood, Illinois.4 For the Panthers and police, though, the bad times were just beginning.
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