Alex Jones and the Right
Michelle Goldberg's New Republic piece on Alex Jones has been getting some attention. I kept running into Jones when I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, but anyone who spends any time on the Internet is likely to have seen stories about Satan and Moloch-worshipping Skull & Bones Bilderbergers posted on one of his Infowars or Prison Planet websites, which link in turn to his books, movies, and radio shows about 9/11, the New World Order, and Obama's on-going efforts to build a totalitarian internationalist police state. Infowars has posted a rejoinder to Goldberg by Paul Joseph Watson--Bilderberg Media Front Smears Alex Jones In Feeble Hit Piece --which pretty much tells you all you need to know about Infowars' characteristic tone and point of view. Goldberg described Jones's Obama conspiracizing as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stripped of any reference to Jews"; Infowars responds by accusing Goldberg 1) Of being a tool of Zionists, and 2) of race-baiting:
Miss Goldberg, is there no end to your cynicism? Don’t you know that constantly invoking anti-semitism as a means of smearing your political adversaries doesn’t work any longer? Perhaps the rapidly declining circulation figures of The New Republic should offer some clue to attest to this fact?Desperate attempts at race pimping as a means to get us all at each other’s throats is so 1990’s. When will you realize that your lame demonization techniques no longer have any effect on a reader with two brain cells left to rub together?
But Goldberg (who is very far from a neo-Conservative war-monger, an Israel-first ADL mouthpiece, or a shill for global corporatism) wasn't so much out to take down Jones himself as she was the elected officials and mainstream pundits who have begun to appear on his show: not just Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Noam Chomsky (who in some respects have always been men of the fringe), but Congressman Louie Gohmert, who listened politely as Jones spoke about the "White House science czar calling for putting stuff in the water to sterilize us," and Fox News' Andrew Napolitano and CNN's Lou Dobbs.Until Obama's election, Jones's paranoia was non-partisan; he hated the Clintons and the Bushes equally as quintessential members of the Global Elite. Obama's election didn't change Jones, but it's made a lot of Republicans insane--and desperate enough to reach out to Jones's rabid constituency. "Jones has become politically salient," Goldberg writes, "because much of the right is as unhinged as he is." And that's something to be scared of.
