Given how many minds, young and otherwise, he’s shaped with his gospel-kids like Luke Rudkowski who’ve adopted this worldview and shaped their lives to answer its call to noble resistance-does Jones ever worry that maybe, just maybe, he’s got it wrong? That maybe the buildings did fall because they were hit by planes? That maybe
it was Osama bin Laden who masterminded the attack? “Sure,” he says, sounding deeply annoyed at the premise of the question. “But the evidence is just too strong.” (Which calls to mind the famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)For Jones, the layers of conspiracy are so thick that they almost eclipse the possibility of any large-scale event occurring naturally. When the Cold War comes up in conversation, he interjects: “Yeah, and it turns out the whole thing was staged!” As were Pearl Harbor, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the AIDS epidemic, the Civil War, global warming, and so on, and on-all have been orchestrated and preplanned by our secret rulers. Asked to name a major historical event that was not a conspiracy, Jones thinks for a long time, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips. “Little Bighorn,” he growls at last. “I don’t think anyone was planning to see Custer get killed that day.”
The Jones Report has a response:
The magazine opted instead to include some of the truth movement’s least represented and most implausible ideas, including kooky sounding notions like “energy beams from outer space, holographic jets and mini-nuclear bombs” (though Radar also includes more likely suspicions of government crime and complicity that Reed acknowledges some 40% of the U.S. population shares in regards to 9/11).
Radar also managed to colorize its language as it played up the paranoia and presented the extreme. Alex Jones is outright portrayed as the commanding general of a dank conspiracy bunker “fighting an all-encompassing battle” against “the globalists and their myriad schemes.” His focus on serious issues such as depopulation are ill-explained and presented in poor context seemingly meant to heighten the sensation of wild word-play and hyperbole in which Jones is meant to be viewed.
In Radar’s defense, the article was meant to be about the more fringe elements of the 9/11 truth movement, so omitting the saner elements of the movement makes sense. I also thought the portrayal of Jones was pretty fair – they had several quotes defending him.
My column on truthers as alt culture is here.