Even now, Alex Jones can't relax. Two weeks after he enraged the entire country by naming the U. S. government as Suspect No. 1 in the bloody slaughter at the Boston Marathon, the radio host and avatar of modern American paranoia is on vacation with his family in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He goes to museums with his kids, takes in the Romanesque baths, laments the decay of the grand old hotels that drew high rollers like Al Capone and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hikes up hillsides steamy with the mist from the natural hot springs that bubble right out of the rocks. But everywhere he looks there are fresh assaults on the American way of life, on liberty itself, and the raging radio voice that transforms him from a gentle family man into a ranting prophet keeps taking demonic possession of his soul.
AJ said:
I know they're going to try to use whatever crisis unfolds, all the different special interests, to sell thousands of robots at millions of dollars apiece in big cities and small towns. They're going to sell armored vehicles and surveillance and data mining. They're going to use it to try to take freedom and offer this lie that the government's there to protect you and CAN protect you, but A, it can't protect you, and B, it doesn't WANT to protect you. It's just a complete fraud! Look at Katrina! Look at Hurricane Sandy! FEMA put up signs saying, "Closed this week for bad weather!" IT'S ALL A JOKE!
At a time when 44 percent of Republicans believe that "an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary" and 54 percent of all Americans think the federal government has too much power, when an entire class of freshman congressmen is throwing any monkey wrench it can find into the democratic process, this is the voice that made Jones famous and rich and astonishingly influential in the conservative movement. His suspicion of the Boston bombing was quickly echoed by New Hampshire state representative Stella Tremblay, who wondered if the man who lost both his legs wasn't faking it. His fears of the government buying up bullets got support from Lou Dobbs and Brian Kilmeade on Fox, leading to congressional hearings spearheaded by Republican congressmen Jason Chaffetz and Jim Jordan, and Fox regular Andrew Napolitano echoed his accusations of government involvement in 9/11. His theories about Benghazi were downright moderate compared with those of Congressman Darrell Issa, who accused the Obama administration of deliberately withholding military support during a terrorist attack. Ron and Rand Paul appear on his show, and Rand has accused Obama, in words that could have come out of Jones's mouth, of being part of the "anti-American globalist plot against our Constitution." The Drudge Report has linked to 244 of his stories in the last two years alone, he's friends with celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Jesse Ventura, his Web sites get up to a million visitors a day. Last year he earned nearly $7 million, plowing all of it right back into his business.
All of this drives the Left into a fury. Here are typical comments from a liberal Web site:
Mr. Jones should be strapped to the floor of a padded cell and pumped full of Thorazine.
I guarantee he doesn't believe his own spiel. He's a carny. What worries me is the number of rubes on the midway who buy what he sells.
Actually, I do think Jones is crazy. This has been going on for years before he got any kind of public attention.
It is all about website hits. Mr. Jones makes his money $.01 at a time.
None of this is true. However extreme and paranoid and downright cartoonish his unending stream of alarm can be, Jones believes every word he says and can prove it with a personal stash of food big enough to last three years. And if they bothered to look without prejudice, these righteous leftists would see that Jones covers issues like the drug war, the growing security state, and Monsanto's genetic modification of food exactly the way they do, just as many of his themes were echoed by the Occupy movement. Their personal attacks just evade the far more troubling question of why so many people on all sides of the political spectrum now believe such radical ideas — why the coal-mine canaries who scream about poison gas whenever hard times come have suddenly appeared everywhere, flocking left and right and straight into the halls of Congress. At a time when
America seems to be minting a thousand new Alex Joneses every day, the bigger question is: What changed? Have these people gone crazy, or do they actually see something the rest of us don't? How do you make an Alex Jones?
In person, he is amiable and easygoing. Average in height, with a bulldog chest and rounded face that is slowly absorbing his fine-cut features, he seems eternally weary and beleaguered in a way that's almost old-fashioned, as if he's bearing a great burden for the sake of others. He has a bad limp that he attributes to his years as a street-fighting teenager. He will talk endlessly about his ideas but seems genuinely embarrassed by talking about himself. He addresses everyone as "brother." He's patient with his children and humane to his employees.
Today, in Hot Springs, he's visibly exhausted. Dressed in blue jeans and a western shirt with the pocket darned, he limps up and down the main drag and vents a bewildering variety of conspiracy theories about everything from the Kennedy assassination to the moon landings to Timothy McVeigh's Murrah Building bombing — he thinks they were all staged — with frequent asides about the trip he took with his kids this morning through the labyrinthine tunnels of a science-museum exhibit called "Underground Arkansas." "It was like some nightmare," he tells me, "and I'm not even claustrophobic." Then his radio voice begins to creep in. By the fifteenth tube I climbed through with my kids, it was just exhausting — a torture device!
To my surprise, Jones often sounds quite liberal. The opposition to gay marriage disgusts him, for example. "Quite frankly, I'm sick of it. Absolutely, people should be able to get married."
Same with abortion. "I get a woman's right, I get all those real arguments."
And the death penalty. "I believe in the death penalty, but it has to be abolished because you can't trust a corrupt government to implement it. Like Texas will put people on death row and when it comes out they're innocent, they try to keep them there."
Even undocumented migrants. "They're here to give corporations subsidized low wages — because they can't live on the low wages they get, so they give them the welfare, and that's designed to give the big corporations an unfair trading advantage. They're using poverty as a tool of control."
Indeed, his suspicion of big business verges on Marxism. "The big corporations talk free market, but they're the ones that are actually pushing regulations to shut down competition — it's just such a screw job."
It comes as no surprise that he's a fan of the Wachowski brothers, the filmmakers who made
The Matrix and
V for Vendetta, tales of the relentless malcontents who squirm through the tunnels of our endlessly networked world.
"Those guys are patriots," he says. "And I admire that Wachowski brother who had a different identity and became—"
"Lana."
"That's what it's all about," he says. "How can you embrace one liberty and not embrace them all?"
These are the qualities that explain his popularity with young listeners who'd shoot holes in the radio at the braying sneers of Rush Limbaugh — like this young man coming down the sidewalk with a picture of a cat licking its balls on his T-shirt. At the sight of Jones, he stops in his tracks and breaks into a smile. "What are you doing in Hot Springs, man?"
Jones smiles back. "Hey, brother, how you doing?"
After the usual small talk, the man in the cat shirt has an urgent question. "What do you think about Bitcoin, man?"
"I've said I'm all for diversity in currencies," Jones answers in his weary way, the world on his shoulders. "Private gold, silver, digital, paper, city currencies, county currencies, organizational currencies. I believe we need competition to the Federal Reserve."
"Absolutely," the man says.
"The government is planning its own global SDR digital currency," Jones continues. "Unless they control Bitcoin, they're going to destroy it. And when it's destroyed, they'll say I supported it."
"They always do that," the man agrees.
In no hurry, Jones lingers, talking about Hot Springs. When he was a kid, his dad brought him here six or seven times. They would camp by the clearest deepwater lake in America and wind up the week at the best hotel in town. Now look at the place. Look at what globalism has done to America. Listen to that giant sucking sound.
"You should come to our new restaurant," the man says.
Hobbling on, Jones returns to his obsessions. He still insists that the Boston bombing was a "false flag" operation, but a false flag doesn't mean it's always the government at work, he says.
It might be corporate interests, it could be other governments, it could even be actual terrorists who are purposely left alone so the government can take advantage of the public's fear to launch a war. There's a pattern to these things. If there's a bombing drill happening at the same time, if they quickly catch "suspects" who have connections to Western intelligence agencies, if the suspects were on terrorism lists but "slipped through" the government's nets, that bombing was 95 percent likely to have been staged. This is the government that lied about WMD, this is the government that lied about Syria using chemical weapons, this is a government USING Al Qaeda to take over Libya and now Syria, that publicly brags "We need Al Qaeda."
He's referring to a pre-9/11 paper from the neocon Project for the New American Century that said the public wouldn't accept higher levels of security "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor," which of course is different from actually calling for a new Pearl Harbor. But in his fever-dream version of America, inference is evidence and everything bad is true.
He continues venting.
And yet they're going to sit there and hyperventilate and make this big production out of Boston and say "Oh my God, it's the Muslim extremists, we've got to give our rights up" — and then it turns out the older brother was sponsored into Georgia, he was allowed to travel back and forth under an assumed name. First the FBI said, "We never heard of him," then it turns out they did know him. These guys are classic intelligence cutouts, like Mohammed Atta of 9/11 fame, trained on a U. S. military base.
On he goes, leaping from slippery rock to slippery rock — big banks laundering drug money, rigging the stock market with global interest-rate fixing and insider trading, the long history of neocon support for the Afghani mujahideen who became Al Qaeda.
Every time, he weaves bits of truth into a blanket statement about the world.
The public is so naive, man.
He winces. "My leg is just throbbing."
"You want to sit down?"
"No, I need to walk it off."
There is something oddly comforting about being with Jones. In a world where so many of us suffer from an "inability to constellate," the modern affliction where stars no longer arrange themselves into the outlines of gods, he has the reassuring authority of Father Knows Best updated for the apocalypse. But when he's talking in italics, it must be said,
the dude is freakin' exhausting: the beige Volkswagen Ted Bundy drove, the name of the guy who bombed the Reichstag, the connections between Malthus and Margaret Sanger,
on and on until you feel like you're being smothered with a pile of mimeographed pamphlets. Now it's a quote from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. The way he puts it, she was asked on NBC or ABC if the death of five hundred thousand Iraqi children was a good price to pay for security in the Middle East, and she said yes.
"I'll have to check the quote," I say, mentioning the documentary where he claimed that Kissinger said Obama would create the New World Order, but
what Kissinger actually said onscreen was that Obama was so popular overseas, he'd reset our foreign policy.
"Henry Kissinger has written papers about what he means by a New World Order."
"But that's not what he said."
"He said Barack Obama will bring a New World Order."
"No, he didn't. He said Barack Obama would be good for our foreign policy because he's so popular. He didn't use the phrase 'New World Order.' "
"He did say New World Order."
"Even if he did, he didn't mean it the way you do.
Why would he admit to some sort of tyrannical plot to conquer the world?"
They say it all the time, he insists. "They brag that Europe is run by private central-bank technocrats. They have written — no exaggeration — it's got to be five hundred articles in the last two or three years, in the
Financial Times of London and everywhere else, describing the end of international sovereignty and these boards and combines running things. This is not my opinion! Hundreds of books have been written by them!
"But they don't say, 'We want to do this so we can dominate the world and have bigger mai tais or whatever it is they supposedly want.
"No, they say they're 'meeting in secret' and then it leaks to some of the British newspapers. Couple years ago, 'Richest People in the World Meet in Secret to Discuss Overpopulation at Rockefeller University in New York.' And they SAY this! It's like the world government's already there! They're just mopping up a few sectors! And then it's David Rockefeller there, as the grand architect of it all."
I can't help laughing. Not David Rockefeller, too.
He sighs. "Fine. None of it's going on. I apologize, none of it's real."
But when I check the Albright quote, it turns out she did say yes when asked if the death of five hundred thousand Iraqi children was worth it. She was sandbagged by a 60 Minutes reporter and she was talking about Clinton's economic sanctions, which were an effort to pressure Saddam Hussein and placate Republicans while avoiding a hot war — but either way, the children died.
Another fan comes up. "Hey Alex, how you doing?
"Hey brother! How you doing?"
"Doin' okay!"
"Well, good to meet you!" Jones says. Smiling, he points at the man's T-shirt. "That's a Target shirt. I've got that same shirt."
The fan moves on, and Jones is already onto Sirhan Sirhan when another stranger says hello, handing over a business card. "We're right next to the Subway," he says. "And we have the best burgers in Arkansas." They start talking about the Murrah Building bombing, which is when this particular stranger — who describes himself as having "liberal inclinations" — became a fan.
Another man stops. "What's up, man?"
The first man says, "This is Alex Jones!"
The fancy people fly to Europe for their vacations now, leaving Hot Springs as tattered as so much of the heartland. But Alex Jones is here. His fans stand around starstruck — and grateful.
As much as Jones likes to talk, the one thing he doesn't like to talk about is his childhood. He squirms, he groans, he gets visibly embarrassed. But he's too polite not to give it a shot.
"My parents weren't big TV watchers, and my mom and my dad liked reading history books. So I went to the library a lot, and I read a lot of history. And when you read history—"
He's at his fan's restaurant now, drinking a glass of homemade ginger ale while the owner watches. "Damn, it's strong."
"But good?"
Instead of answering, Jones asks how they make it. The man explains and Jones takes it in, a sounding board for humanity. But eventually he goes away and Jones must return to his uncomfortable task.
"So when you read history, the truth is condensed for you — the subterfuge, the manipulations, the setups."
