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Alex Jones, Pizzagate booster and America’s most famous conspiracy theorist, explained

"Alex Jones FARTS During Live Show!! WTF??"

Donald Trump echoes Alex Jones's mouth farts.

Alex Jones thinks Barack Obama is a literal demon from hell. Donald Trump respects him.

Updated by Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Dec 7, 2016, 10:03am EST

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Jones’s large audience has given him the ability to impact real-world events. In 2009, the National Guard had scheduled an exercise in Arcadia, Iowa, where volunteers in the town would playact as foreign civilians to practice operations in an urban environment.

Jones, perhaps unsurprisingly, saw something far more nefarious. He aired a radio segment in which he called the exercise an “invasion” plot by “dirtbag Soviet scum, the ones that funded both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis.” The National Guard, Jones warned, “want to cull our butt!”

This led to a massive outcry from Jones fans, who flooded the National Guard with complaints and plans to protest. The guard canceled the operation — and while they claimed the cancellation had nothing to do with the Jones-led uproar, that’s kind of hard to believe.

“He can take nothing and turn into a real world problem because his followers can then go act on things,” Pitcavage says.

The number of people willing to listen to this kind of talk has only grown since Barack Obama’s election. In 2009, there were 149 so-called “Patriot groups,” organizations that share Jones’s belief in the New World Order conspiracy, according to SPLC data. By 2012, there were 1,360 nationwide, an increase of more than 800 percent.

This mirrored the far right’s surge during the Clinton years; it seems that Democratic governance inspires anti-government extremism. Race may also have been a factor, though Pitcavage stresses that the overlap between the Alex Jones crowd and the white supremacist crowd is surprisingly minimal.

Interestingly, online racists hate Alex Jones, as they believe he focuses too much on the New World Order and not enough on the threat from minorities and Jews. He recently got into on-air fight with David Duke, the infamous former Ku Klux Klan leader, surrounding Jones’s refusal to focus on the Jewish role in the New World Order. (Jones’s wife, incidentally, is of Jewish descent.)

“I have long said that one of the biggest roadblocks we have in bringing large numbers of people to our ranks is Alex Jones,” writes one poster at the Daily Stormer, one of America’s premier neo-Nazi sites. “He talks about many real issues but does everything in his power to discredit factual information on Jewish and Zionist power.”

Whatever the reason behind the surge in Jones-style conspiracy theorizing, its rise definitely helps explains Jones’s audience growth in the past eight years. As far-right conspiracy theories become more popular, so too has the most famous proponent of those theories.

But that’s only a partial explanation. To understand how Alex Jones became the incredibly well-known, popular figure he is today, you need to understand his relationship with more mainstream conservative media outlets — or, more specifically, his relationship with Matt Drudge.

How Alex Jones and the Republican Party became intertwined

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As the Obama administration went on, Drudge and Jones’s relationship deepened. In early 2013, Drudge declared that the coming year would be “the year of Alex Jones” — a prophecy that had been set up by his own work. Between April 2011 and April 2013, Drudge had linked to 244 separate articles on Infowars or PrisonPlanet, according to Media Matters’ Ben Dimiero. These articles include:

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A November 2012 article promoting claims that James Holmes, the man [then] on trial for the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, may actually have been under the influence of CIA "mind control." The piece was based around a story told by an "alleged inmate" supposedly in jail with Holmes, who claimed Holmes told him he was "programmed" to kill by an "evil" therapist.

A July 2012 post highlighting an interview between Jones and Joseph Farah, editor of conspiracy website WND. During that interview, Farah suggested that if Obama were re-elected, people like him and Jones would be "hunted down like dogs."

A March 2012 piece suggesting that the death of conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart may not have been the result of natural causes, but instead related to a "damning" video about President Obama Breitbart had supposedly planned to release the day of his death.
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Drudge wasn’t the only Jones validator on the mainstream right, according to Dimiero. The Paul family, both former Rep. Ron and Sen. Rand, have appeared on the Alex Jones Show (the former was a frequent guest). Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs and Andrew Napolitano have been on; conservative celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Ted Nugent also paid Jones some visits.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. As historian Rick Perlstein details in the Baffler, the conservative movement has long been afflicted by conspiracy theorists, going back to its origins in the ’50s and ’60s. Oftentimes, these people have exploited the fears of conservatives for profit.

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It’s easy to see where Jones is coming from. Read the following set of quotes and tell me whether they’re Trump or Jones:

* “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.”

* “It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

* “This election will determine whether we remain a free nation or only the illusion of democracy.”

They’re all Trump quotes, of course. Like Jones, Trump sees dark conspiracies everywhere — an elite that’s secretly oppressing Americans, and that only he can fix. Trump doesn’t need to say the phrase “New World Order” to get the point across to people like Jones; language about “globalism” is clear enough for those people to glom onto it.

This isn’t just a dog whistle for the Jones crowd. As my colleague Yochi Dreazen notes, Trump’s language about a global economic elite is directly reminiscent of classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, ones embraced by many Trump fans on the “alt-right.” Jones himself has also dabbled in this stuff, despite his feud with the neo-Nazis: In one October broadcast, he warned of a “Jewish mafia” that controls the health care system, which is soon “going to hurt you.” Nevertheless, Jones insisted, “I’m not against Jews.”

Trump has at times gone further than dog whistling, and actually amplified conspiracies invented or promoted by Infowars.

Trump declared that the Environmental Protection Agency manufactured the California drought to protect a fish, a claim that appears to have originated on Infowars. His theory that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination, or that Antonin Scalia may have been murdered? Yep, both on Infowars.

Can we prove that Trump is getting his conspiratorial ideas from Jones? Not really, but there isn’t another explanation that makes a lot of sense.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/28/13424848/alex-jones-infowars-prisonplanet