Short Cuts: Episode IV 
Alex Jones Is About To Explode
The Austin radio host’s wild conspiracy theories—The swine flu vaccine will lead to martial law! 9/11 was an inside job! An evil global network is preparing to institute a New World Order!—have already earned him dedicated fans across the country. But as the tea parties and Obama hatred go mainstream, he may be ready to give Glenn Beck a run for his money.
Dave says: I hate knowing that I live in a world where people believe the junk conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones sell. (November 22nd, 2011 at 2:27am)
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Nothing offends Jones more than the suggestion that he just pulls stuff out of the air. “You haven’t read the documents I have,” he told me time and time again. Jones does employ several researchers, and almost everything he says is grounded in some objective fact, however far removed from his on-air assertions it may be. When I scoffed, for example, at his claim that Monsanto, the giant agribusiness company, was intentionally killing people with its genetically modified crops, he sent me several articles from mainstream publications, one pointing to organ failure in rats fed Monsanto’s corn and another outlining the revolving door between Monsanto’s upper management and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has consistently declined to regulate genetically modified foods. None of it was news to me—the Sierra Club, which Jones regards as an agent of the New World Order, has been warning people about genetically modified crops for at least ten years. But where the Sierra Club argues that Monsanto is ignoring the potential danger to humans and the environment in its drive for profit, Jones argues it’s doing so because it wants us dead. When I suggested to Jones that people would be more likely to listen to his ideas if he didn’t tie everything to his theory about the New World Order, he wouldn’t have it. “They’re not doing it to make money, Nate. Wake up and listen to what I’m saying.”
Jones can be confrontational and dismissive, but he also has an oddly childlike manner that surfaces from time to time. After a lengthy and contentious interview one afternoon, he called me back a few hours later. “Do you think what I’m doing is bad?” he wanted to know. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
Jones is also capable of laughing at himself. A few years ago he recorded a “don’t talk during the movie” public service announcement for Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse theater chain in which he parodied his own persona. “We’re going to find out who these talkers are, we’re going to find out where their funding comes from, and we’re going to shut them down!” he shouted. Candid video of Jones shot by his friend Kevin Booth likewise shows a side of him that rarely surfaces on the radio. After the Bohemian Grove exposé came out, Jones and Booth returned to the area, and Booth filmed Jones goofing off near the entrance and then driving through the dense redwood trees nearby. With the tape rolling, Jones pulls over to ask a middle-aged man and woman standing by an old, tarpaulin-covered pickup on the side of the road what they think of Bohemian Grove. It immediately becomes apparent that the woman is deranged. “Is that an electric eye?” she asks, looking into Booth’s camera. As they pull away, Jones is clearly delighted that Booth got the encounter on tape: It was another classic access-television moment. “You’re beginning to sink deeper into the rabbit hole now,” he says as Booth giggles. “This is like a Lovecraft novel: You have, like, this enslaved mass of gibbering creatures—most of them you will find are gibbering—and then you’ve got the world leaders.”
There has always been a tension, even in Jones’s public persona, between the iconoclast and the entertainer. “To me, Alex is funny,” said Booth. “He has that Orson Welles showmanship. He’s funny on a different level, even when he’s not really trying to be funny.” Booth, who grew up with the late Texas comedian Bill Hicks and produced his comedy recordings, once thought of Jones as the natural heir to carry on Hicks’s legacy. Hicks’s act was dark and overtly political, and like Jones, he was tormented by what happened at Waco. In 2000 Booth culled some of the most confrontational and outlandish moments from Jones’s access show and produced a low-budget video called The Best of Alex Jones. “I thought that I was going to introduce Alex Jones to all the Bill Hicks fans and they were all going to love him,” Booth recalled. “They thought that I had completely lost my mind.”
Booth, who featured Jones in his new medical marijuana documentary, How Weed Won the West, still thinks there’s a market for the lighter side of Alex Jones. He recently created a trailer for a reality TV show—a sort of “Day in the Life of Alex Jones”—that he has been shopping to producers in Hollywood. “It was going to show the crazy world of Alex Jones and not be so much about the conspiracy theories,” Booth said. Nobody bought it. Like Hicks’s fans, the producers didn’t seem to see the side of Jones that Booth saw. “They said, ‘If Alex Jones is going to be funny, we need to see it.’ ” To add insult to injury, TruTV recently launched a reality show called Conspiracy Theory, with Jesse Ventura, a frequent guest on Jones’s radio show. Jones, who is a paid consultant to Conspiracy Theory and has appeared on the show, told me he wishes Ventura well. But the topics Ventura covers—9/11, the New World Order, eugenics—are right in Jones’s wheelhouse. Ventura is clearly stealing his thunder.
“I would just love to be able to see Alex breaking through to the mainstream,” Booth said, though it might mean moderating his message somewhat and losing some of his longtime fans. “I think Alex fears that if he suddenly kind of lets his hair down a little bit those people are going to think that he’s a traitor or that he was full of shit all the time, that he didn’t really mean it. I think he fears that his fans won’t love him anymore.”
Of course there’s nothing funny about America being taken over by a fascist dictatorship bent on killing most of the population. Now that Jones has become a guru to so many, can he have it both ways? Can he laugh at himself without laughing at his audience too? Jones didn’t want to talk about the reality show trailer. “Kevin Booth is always pitching shows to producers in Hollywood. It’s what he does,” he said. “It’s a non-issue.” And he was offended by the notion that there might be a different Alex Jones hidden beneath the one his listeners hear every day. “I’m real, okay?” Jones said. “I’m real. I don’t want my own TV show. I’m happy with what I’m doing. I don’t want stardom. That’s what you don’t understand about me.”
By dint of his show’s success and longevity, Jones has become an establishment figure in his own anti-establishment movement. There are now conspiracy theories on the Web about Jones himself: that he is a CIA agent, a cog in a Jesuit conspiracy (with Charlie Sheen), or a Zionist, out to cover up the secret Jewish role in the September 11 attacks. “It’s all complete hogwash,” Jones said. More troubling, he told me, is the way personalities at the top of the media food chain have been co-opting his message. Glenn Beck is the worst, he said. “Two weeks after I have a guest on, they have him on. Three weeks after I play a video on air of George Bernard Shaw saying, ‘If you’re not productive in society, then the socialists are gonna kill you, and Hitler is good,’ he’s playing it on his show,” he said. “We fished that out. We got that from a European filmmaker. It’s like we’re programming their show. Beck says, ‘It’s not about a Democrat, it’s not about a Republican; we’ve got to change the paradigm.’ He says all that, but then he says, ‘But the Republicans are going to save us.’ Glenn Beck is literally word for word taking everything I do and twisting it and turning it into a Roger Ailes Fox News evil doppelgänger of my show,” he said.
Jones sees the same thing happening to the tea party movement. “The tea parties were started by 9/11 truth groups, going out and protesting and calling people out. And then you had the Ron Paul Revolution in 2007, 2008. And by early 2009 you would have Rick Perry or John Cornyn giving a speech and they would be booed by the tea party people. But the media wasn’t reporting on that. MSNBC and others were saying it’s all orchestrated by Republicans.” It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, Jones said, as Glenn Beck and Fox News began sponsoring their own tea party events. “It’s very simple: The Republicans are out of power, so they can now play the part of the rebels. They’re trying to ride the coattails of this populist uprising and co-opt it.”
If this uprising seems more than a little paranoid, that’s hardly a new phenomenon. What the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style” in American politics seems to be waxing again, and it brings with it a fundamental problem for our national politics: How can we have a meaningful dialogue if we can’t even agree on basic facts? Was President Obama born in Hawaii or wasn’t he? Will the health care reform bill establish “death panels” or not? Can burning jet fuel melt metal structural beams or can’t it?
But Jones and his ilk didn’t create this crisis of credibility. Jones’s younger followers, after all, came of age hearing Colin Powell assure the UN that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase uranium in Niger, though the evidence was shaky at best. Or Dick Cheney desperately trying to tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or the president of the United States assuring the world that we knew Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, only to find out it wasn’t true after thousands of lives had been lost.
Still, plenty of people who are appalled by such deceptions can’t bring themselves to follow Jones all the way down his rabbit hole. His refusal to moderate his message means he has, in effect, limited the trajectory of his own career. But Jones told me he doesn’t care if he’s not taken seriously today. “I care about people seeing what I said in twenty years and saying, ‘Man, that guy was right.’ Because that’s a time bomb for the enemy. People are still in denial today, but decades from now the information that we put out will be so accurate that it will be taken like revelation. And so even if they set me up, kill me, it won’t matter, because it was about the information. And even if they destroy me, they fail in the end.”
My Library
