197: Alex Jones

Alex Jones is the guy who has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t endorse, no matter how batshit insane it is (and, interestingly, no matter how much it conflicts with other conspiracy theories he already believes). For at least ten years he has predicted, in his rather popular radio program, the imminent roundup of Americans by the New World Order.

In addition to his radio program, he is also the director of several straight-to-video documentaries, and he runs the websites Infowars and PrisonPlanet (for those who wish to avoid the site itself, it is detailed here).

Some conspiracy theories endorsed by PrisonPlanet are:

-The Bilderberg Group (or Skull and Bones, or the Freemasons - it depends on the day, it seems) controls some/most/all governments in the world as well as the economy.

-The New World Order will kill almost everyone. Vaccine programs seem to be just one of their methods – of course Jones has endorsed Andrew Wakefield as a martyr. To get a feel for the level it is pitched at, you may want to check out this one - or then again, maybe not.

-In fact, Hurricane Katrina was merely an opportunity to test out the FEMA concentration camps.

-And the tsunami in south-east Asia in 2004 was man-made.

-9/11 was (of course) an inside job.

This is, of course, only a selection; in general it is hard to find a loon that Jones does not take seriously. He is basically a living embodiment of whale.to.

Other bizarre antics are chronicled on his wikipedia page. Apparently the ravingly mad and utterly dense (but British) Vicount Monckton views PrisonPlanet as a legitimate news outlet. That explains a lot.

The interesting thing about Alex Jones’ reasoning is that he does not seem to run with the common fallacy ‘authorities (e.g. scientific) say X; I don’t like X; hence there must be a conspiracy’, but rather with the inference rule ‘everything is part of a conspiracy; authorities say X; hence X is false’ (which is a fallacy as well, of course, but a somewhat more interesting one).

Now, some may think Alex Jones is batshit crazy, and he is. But surely he is beaten by Lorie Kramer, who believes that Alex Jones is a pawn created by the New World Order to divert attention. Seriously. And if that is not enough, this site, run by Gary & Lisa Ruby, claims that Jones is part of a scientologist conspiracy to take over the world and demolish Christianity. I guess this is what you risk when you start to gain notoriety in the hyper-paranoid and chaotic field of conspiracy theory.

Among Jones’s more notable collaborators is the equally insane Paul Joseph Watson, who may consider himself indicted by this entry as well (he does not deserve a separate one). Watson is, among other things, behind this, uh, illuminating screed.

Diagnosis: The ur-loon. Extremely famous and frighteningly influential, but one suspects that he would be able to convince anyone who were not already at least mildly unhinged. Jones may be partly in it for the money, but there is little question that he actually believes much of whatever falls out of his mouth.

#848: Lorie Kramer

A.k.a. Lo the Seektress

Lorie Kramer is among the most ardent critics of Alex Jones on the web. Unfortunately, her criticisms of Alex Jones come, shall we say, from a different angle than ours. Kramer runs the website The Alex Jones Machine, a website allegedly “created in self defense” in order to expose Alex Jones for who he is – a central part of the Zionist conspiracy to take over the world. Just like Glenn Beck and Fox News, Jones is in the hands of powerful Jewish bankers, and Kramer sets out to prove Alex and Kelly Jones’s connections to Bronfman. On the other hand, Jeff Rense is apparently a hero because he once called out Alex Jones and was promptly forced out of the Jones fold. The evidence is clear. At one point Kramer had to ask herself “who really runs the GNC network”, and given that Kramer is the person she is, the answer was more or less a given once that question was asked.

Currently she also runs seektress.com, where she panders conspiracies and various rants about spirituality, channeling, politics, UFOs, chemtrails, and Morgellons (which, according to authority Clifford E. Carnicom, is caused by chemtrails).

Diagnosis: In ardent combat with oppression and evil. It would have been an advantage if Kramer would spend her efforts in a manner that was informed by reality instead, but that’s apparently too much to ask for. Probably harmless.

#496: Jason Bermas

Jason Bermas is a filmmaker most famous for his involvement in films such as Fabled Enemies, Loose Change, and Invisible Empire. Loose Change is, of course, the famous documentary asserting that 9/11 was an inside job (directed by Dylan Avery, whom we unfortunately missed even on this second round, and produced by Bermas, Matthew Brown, and Korey Rowe, with none other than Alex Jones as the executive producer). The movie argues that 9/11 was a set-up in order for the US to justify a war in Iraq, but unfortunately offers no explanation for why the government would carry out this ruse and subsequently not incorporate any connection to Iraq in their elaborate scheme (e.g. by making the hijackers have some connection to Iraq). See also this. For a viewer’s guide to Loose Change, you can go here. It is worth noting that Bermas said of Mark Roberts (who constructed the viewer’s guide) “[h]e's betraying this country and humanity,” and Alex Jones called him “[a]n absolute demon”. This site offers helpful guidance as well.

“Fabled Enemies” was another attempt from Bermas at the 9/11 conspiracy. “Invisible Empire” is, as you guessed, about the New World Order.

Bermas used to host The Infowarrior, a political, caller-based and widely distributed t Alex Jones spinoff talkshow. He is currently alternate host of The Alex Jones show itself.

Diagnosis: A rising star in the insanity movement, Bermas efficiently applies his lack of critical thinking skills to a variety of (interlinked) areas in you typical crank magnet manner. One to watch

#585: Felipe Coronel

A.k.a. Immortal Technique

Felipe Coronel, better known as Immortal Technique, is an underground rapper and conspiracy theorist. Despite his left-wing activism he is apparently on pretty good terms with Alex Jones, and certainly shares much of the latter’s notorious paranoia. Coronel has for instance endorsed New World Order conspiracies and 9/11 conspiracies (if you really want to, you can see him discuss the latter with Alex Jones here). Coronel’s lunacy on these issues hence provides an unfortunate contrast to his otherwise admirable contributions to the human project.

And yes, the Coronel’s lunacy is pretty much off the charts; not even Alex Jones has, to my knowledge, tried to argue that “The Illuminati grew stronger after Jesus died for our sins.” The idea of “genetically engineered HIV,” which Coronel attributes to rightwing politicians, freemasons and Satanic Illuminati agents (that’s apparently one single group), is more mainstream, as is his ideas of mind control through MKULTRA. Evidence? Coronel can make it rhyme. That seems to be convincing enough to many, and his UK fan website, for instance, reads as a slightly less coherent version of whale.to.

Diagnosis: Batshit crazy. He does good stuff as well, to be sure, but it is not clear that his positive efforts aren’t, in the long run, pretty much undermined by his crazy.

#727: Jeffrey Grupp

Jeffrey Grupp calls himself a “Buddhist and postmodernist philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan”, and is a regular on such erudite shows as “Coast to Coast AM” with George Noory, and “Infowars”, where he presents concepts such as “telementation”, the “idea that a deep feeling state inside you can alter reality in ways that you want,” similar to the Law of Attraction. He does, in fact, have a formal education in philosophy, though despite the “Dr.” title that appears on several of his youtube videos he doesn’t appear to have defended his thesis “Quantum Deleuze” yet. He has written the book Telementation: Cosmic Feeling and the Law of Attraction, as well as Corporatism: The Secret Government of the New World Order, however, but that isn’t quite the same.

His focus is the topic of the latter book, namely to be a libertarian conspiracy theorist of the most extreme kind there is. His main concern is the New World Order and the shadowy organization behind it, such as the Federal Reserve, Codex Alimentarius, the North American Union, the WTO and IMF – and all the FEMA concentration camps set up all over the US to incarcerate freedom advocates like himself. In addition, he is worried that the patriot movement is being hijacked by plants of the shadowy organization such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter: “The New World Order wants worldwide rioting, mass death, economic collapse, sacrifice of lower minions and freemasons of the New World Order, compliance with the climate change (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial) laws and servitude, and a set up of a Brave New World, all over the course of the next decade or decades.” He even has “proof” that the New World Order wants to use the Truth Movement and similar movements to subvert its critics; in 2009 some news agencies said that a Pittsburgh police shooting “was due to the shooter listening to the words of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.” So there. The fact that someone in the media said this is virtually solid proof that there is a conspiracy against Alex Jones. As solid as French postmodernism with a dose of quantum thrown in, on surmises. The logic is indeed impeccable; similar things have happened before: “After World War II, we were told that the war was caused by the mass madness of the world citizenry, not by the New World Order, and thus Truman had to set up all those mental health acts that he did in order that We the People could be cured of our irrationalism.” I think a standard Philosophy class on critical thinking would have told Grupp that a weak analogy based with a piece of your imagination fails to be considered particularly compelling evidence by most people, but Grupp might have been absent that day.

So as you see, the conspiracy is pretty much all-pervasive, and it’s good that we have people like Grupp who sees through it all. He seems, indeed, to be supporting more or less all of these, including how “the New World Order is going to make our Truth and Patriot movements their primary tools of operation to carry out Eugenics and so forth,” and in particular to target the all-time hero of freedom-loving people, Alex Jones.

Diagnosis: Astonishingly crazy and astonishingly paranoid, mixing wingnut paranoia with post-modernism, quantum woo, and the Law of Attraction. You can’t top this one. Possibly a poe.

#2294: Robert David Steele

Robert David Steele is a former CIA officer who has found a new career as a major league crackpot: given his background, paranoid conspiracy theorists are naturally inclined believe that Steele’s wild-eyed rantings carry some sort of authority, especially since Steele claims to have government resources at his disposal: for instance, according entirely to himself, Steele helped President Trump use the NSA database to “get every name, date and place for every pedophile, every traitor and every white collar criminal in the United States of America.” Yes, this one’s for the QAnon and pizzagate crowds, and builds on some remarkably resilient conspiracy tropes in wingnut circles.

Steele was also the one who told Alex Jones about the pedophile colonies the government has on Mars: “We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” said Steele, “so that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.” And if you wonder what the purpose would be for NASA to go through such efforts, Steele is ready to explain: “Pedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children. It goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood and then murdering them. It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts” (ok, so for an explanation this misses some details, such as why they would go to Mars rather than some local pizza parlor, but it’s the best you’ll ever get for this type of claim.) “This is the original growth hormone,” commented Alex Jones. “Yes, it’s an anti-aging thing,” Steele replied. Now remember that President Trump listens to Alex Jones’s show, rather than to the “fake news” of the mainstream media.

Steele also told deranged dingbat Sheila Zilinsky that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, she would have legalized bestiality and pedophilia. He was, however, quick to lay the blame for his imaginary Clinton-policies on the Jews: “Hollywood has been run by Zionists from day one,” said Steele said, “and Hollywood was designed, inclusive of Walt Disney, was designed to destroy American values.” For instance, “if you go back and look at every Shirley Temple movie, it is essentially soft porn for pedophiles […], they are essentially the pedophile’s wet dream.” Steele’s reaction to watching Shirley Temple movies should, in other words, be the cause for some concern. Continued Steele: “We have senior founding Zionists in Hollywood saying, ‘Our objective is to eliminate all American values,’ [he did, curiously, not provide any attribution for the quote] and we have a senator who has exposed a memorandum from Loretta Lynch, had Hillary Clinton become president, they were going to legalize bestiality and pedophilia.” 

Steele also believes that “Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad clandestine operations officer” whose mission was to “entrap US politicians, judges, celebrities, prosecutors, and corporate leaders with rigged ‘no name’ hotels and the multi-cavern ‘Lolita Island’” with the help of the FBI and CIA – not to expose them, mind, since FBI and CIA are evil, but to blackmail them (Epstein is, moreover, probably still alive). Accordingly, he hopes that “President Donald Trump follows through on this – and then throws in 9/11 disclosure [but of course] and an end to our support for Zionist Israel and its unregistered agents bribing and blackmailing everyone of consequence (AIPAC and ADL),” suggesting that if he does, “then he will in all probability be re-elected in a landslide, at the same time that the Democrats lose the House and 27 states flush their Governors and state legislators out of office for making it a felony to speak freely about the need to boycott Zionist genocidal apartheid criminal invented state Israel.”

Steele is currently Chief Enabling Officer of the Earth Intelligence Network and CEO of Open Source Everything. His insights have appeared for instance on the globalresearch webpage, including his article “The Soft Coup Collapses – CIA Bluffing, Russia Did Not Hack, Blackmail Revealed – What Next?” about the alleged deep-state conspiracy against President Trump, presumably because Trump’s tireless work against Zionist child abuse on Mars is a threat to their machinations.

He has also written numerous books, including The Orlando Mass Casualty Event: A False Flag Drama, Atrocity, or Hybrid? and the somewhat confusingly titled EYES ONLY: For the President (and the Public): Everything the Deep State Does Not Want You To Know. Steele’s earlier predictions for revolution (“all preconditions for revolution are now present in the US and Britain”) and WW3 starting in 2019, which was met with some enthusiasm in the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) community (where Steele used to be a respected figure), should probably be evaluated in light of his more recent revelations.

Diagnosis: Yes, people – lots of people, apparently – believe this. We can and should point and laugh, of course, but it’s pretty scary.  

#2043: Dave Mustaine

Dave Mustaine is the co-funder of Megadeth and thus a celebrity loon in the tradition of such luminaries as Ted Nugent. Mustaine has voiced his support for an impressive range of wingnut conspiracy theories and is, for instance, a birther, having claimed that Obama was born outside of the US and therefore ineligible to be president (“Why hasn’t somebody moved to impeach this man,” asked Mustaine: “With all of the proof about his birth certificate being a fake, and you see the signs in Kenya saying, ‘The birthplace of Barack Obama.’ Hello! Come on, guys. How stupid are we right now?”). And in 2012 he accused Obama of staging the Aurora mass shooting and the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting in order to push a gun control agenda (he also pushed wingnut Fast and Furious conspiracies and said that the country looked like it was turning into “Nazi America”, which is so inanely meaningless that we won’t bother). When family members of victims were unimpressed with Mustaine’s comments, he told Alex Jones that he didn’t have any intention to hurt anyone with his comments. He still thought it was a conspiracy.

Yes, Alex Jones. Mustaine is a fan, and even wrote the album Endgame based on Jones’ film of the same name in order to “educate his fans and the general public about the march towards a New World Order and Global government”.

Before being born again, Mustaine claims to have practiced black magic. “When I got into black magic I put a couple of spells on people when I was a teenager and it haunted me forever, and I’ve had so much torment,” said Mustaine, and is apparently unwilling to play certain older tracks because he thinks their black magic powers might hurt someone.

Trivia: To celebrate his non-endorsing endorsement of Rick Santorum in 2012, Mother Jones put together this quiz.

Diagnosis: Ok, so it’s a celebrity loon, and we sort of sympathize with those who think that we shouldn’t give these any more attention. But Mustaine’s deranged conspiracy theories are of a particularly odious kind, and if we could just convince one person not to give this guy any more money, we think we’d be doing something good.