Imagine a sweating Alex Jones trying to convince a judge that the Sandy Hook parents sitting in the same court room are possibly actors from the deep state lair of George Soros. And then imagine the laughter of the entire Internet. The funny memes we will get out of that should be around for years.
You probably know that Alex Jones is being sued for his reporting by various angry people, such as Sandy Hook parents (“crisis actors”), a guy who was depicted as a possible Parkland shooter (“shooter is a commie”), a leftwing man who filmed an attack at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protests (“looks like a deep state Soros operative”) and others. Barely a week goes by without a new million dollar lawsuit and the future of Jones’s company Infowars as well as the future legal limitations of conspiracy media in general are uncertain. Maybe next week the owner of the Comet Ping Pong-restaurant will sue as well for Jones’ conspiracy theories. Legal fees, possible settlements, or even losing in court will get very expensive and a public court battle would likely end in an embarrassing disaster with his own employees and former employees testifying against him. Some of his employees have been sued as well and this will scare his entire staff and might discourage others from working at that place. Also, other bloggers and youtubers have been sued for similar reporting.
Of course Jones claims to be the embodiment of everything good and that he is being targeted by the deep state and therefore the real deal. I wish it was that simple.
These lawsuits will very soon determine the legal boundaries and necessary quality standards of conspiracy reporting.
Villagers hunting witches
Some observers on different sides of this battle remind me of angry villagers in medieval times hunting witches. Certain folks from the mainstream and the left denounce all conspiracy reporting from the right and are ganging up against these righwing conspiracy theorists (witches), to identify them, harrass them and burn them at the stake publically. Public court cases can be a modern day witch burning. Everything gets lumped together into the same category.: If you don’t trust the 9/11 comission, you are regarded as one of those witches who believe that Sandy Hook was just a buch of actors from the deep state.
Some people from the conspiracy crowd also behave like medieval villagers. When something like Sandy Hook or the Charlottesville attack creates bad publicity for the rightwing and the 2nd Amendment, certain conspiracy people don’t investigate in a professional manner. Instead, they look for witches. They point at the parents of Sandy Hook victims, call them witches and collect firewood for the public burning. More and more supposed witches are identified, publically harassed and in some cases even threatened with death on social media and elswhere.
We all need to stop this primitive witch hunting mentality because it is nothing but group narcissism that subverts our grasp on reality. The mainstream and the left is pressuring all kinds of folks into abandoning every (rightwing) conspiracy hypothesis. If you don’t abandon your belief, there will be consequences. And some conspiracy folks also act like fanatics. If you doubt their particular pet theory, they will fly into a rage as if you insulted their mother and accuse you of being a conspirator.
Lousy reporting
The quality of conspiracy reporting has become quite terrible unfortunately. It is dominated by questionable leaks, Russian propaganda and shoddy clickbait nonsense. There are several reasons for that decline:
- Conspiracy media creators and their audiences usually don’t read a significant amount of quality books of different categories. I try to be transparent and posted my reading list of hundreds of books about the history of empires, intelligence agencies, criminology, psychology, political science etc. You don’t need a university degree to report on politics and conspiracies, but you absolutely have to read quality literature. As an audience you don’t have to read that many books, but you still need to read books. There are some great ones where you learn fast and save time. Proper investigative reporting, especially if it involves history, is actually very complicated and hard to do. But Youtubers treat it as if anybody could do this job with almost no qualifications. It’s easy to bluff an audience when the audience does not read books.
- Pressure to produce clickbait nonsense: You don’t get paid and noticed for reading quality books and learning about a topic. You get paid for publishing reports fast that sound sensational, clickbait which tells the audience what it wants to hear, viral nonsense that triggers emotions and simple reactions, stuff that reenforces what the audience already beliefs. True professional investigative reporting takes time and effort. You create and develop different possible scenarios, you don’t simply start with a conclusion that you personally like and your audience wants to hear and then work backwards from that conclusion, eliminating anything that contradicts your wishes. You need to look further into inconsistencies instead of presenting them as iron clad evidence. Very often inconsistencies are cleared up. Whole leads might go nowhere. We live in the era of clickbait. A tragedy with 20 deaths is only headline news for two days. Youtubers want to satisfy their audiences fast and capitalize on the attention. Reports are written in 20 minutes. Videos are produced in an hour or two. It’s as shoddy as it gets. Real journalists might get a real sensation once in their career. Political Youtubers present fake sensations every other day to keep their audiences entertained. It takes hard work, luck, sources and experience to land a hit story. Youtubers and bloggers just fake something. They make something up and brand every criticism and doubt as malicious.
- Youtube algorithms have been pushing and rewarding clickbait nonsense for years. Entire careers have been built on clickbait and fakes. The audience has demanded clickbait fakes. When something important happens, many youtubers immediately think how they should respond to get the maximum attention. They look what the Russians are saying, or what successful youtubers are saying, they mix in Trump hype and Putin hype because false promises get attention. Audiences love good news and group narcissism.
- Conspiracy youtubers often know very little about police work and investigations. Therefore they can’t really spot deviations from standard procedure. So when for example a school shooting happens and police briefly detains a person in the area, that’s a standard procedure. Check the identity, then let him or her go. But when mainstream media reports that somebody has been briefly detained, conspiracy theorists falsely count this as evidence for a second shooter and evidence for a conspiracy.
Sandy hook conspiracy theorists made one mistake after another. One official statistic for Newtown didn’t list the dead and instead of following this up, conspiracy theorists (including Jones) counted this as evidence for a conspiracy. However, the dead simply had been counted in other statistics for bureaucratic reasons. There was even a footnote attached to the Newtown statistic about the dead. It was one of many embarrassing blunders for Infowars. Basic journalistic work was not done.
Then came the nonsense about crisis actors that lead to the recent lawsuits against Infowars. Yes, crisis actors do exist and we know from Operation Northwoods (amongst other examples) that governments are willing to stage an attack and even bury empty coffins to creat a pretext to invade Cuba. However, the idea of staging a shooting like Sandy Hook with actors is blatantly absurd. Those in charge of an operation like this would have to control all the actors, all the emergency personnel on the scene, the police, reporters, emergency room personnel, other staff in the hospitals, bystanders and so on. We are talking hundreds of people that have to be clued in for this operation to work. Hundreds of people who need to play their part knowing that it’s fake. Intelligence professionals only use superficial fake identities and throw-away passports in a limited manner for clandestine operations. But when you parade your agents in front of news cameras you would have to create believable backstories, because local populations would otherwise know that these supposed victims and parents are not real people from the area. Inserting agents into a community in a believable manner takes years of preparations and is incredibly expensive. It’s not just another job for a crisis actor. It means professional deep cover agents spending years on a single job. They also need fake relatives who have to spend years on this one job. And what’s going to happen when the fake massacre is over? The agents can’t just all disappear without a trace overnight. They’d have to slowly fade away, taking more years. And what would you have to do as a deep state black ops unit in order to prevent teh truth from leaking? Surveilling hundreds of people for a long time afterwards to make sure nobody exposes this. All the cops, medical professionals etc.
That would take thousands of agents just to do the surveillance. And these surveilling agents would then also be in the know. How do you make sure one of these agents doesn’t expose this and e.g. send evidence to Wikileaks? It’s absurd. Secret operations are not done this way. Illegal operations require the least amount of people in the know as possible. A plan is broken up into segments and agents with supporting roles, useful idiots and so forth.
Governments only have to wait until some mentally unstable person does something stupid and violent. Personality disorders, especially narcissism mixed with pills can cause an explosion of violence. Governments only have to wait and exploit these things. No requirement for actors and overly complicated operations. If a government does not want to wait, there are simple kinds of operations that can be conducted. We have John Marks’ book “Search for the Manchurian Candidate” and a few other reliable books on mind control research. Some wild brainwashing experiments got the most attention, but it’s the simpler kind of operations that we need to focus on. There is a variety of substances and cocktails that can be secretly administered to create or enhance psychological disorders and distress. A specific goal of the MKULTRA charter was to find susbtances to discredit people, make them go crazy, incapable of work and to undermine marriages. Give an unstable person a tiny whiff of BZ, a serotonin-antagonist and some other disruptive chemical and that person is going to go off like a bomb.
Simple, cheap, easy. Least amount of people in the know. Target person goes on a rampage. The mayhem is real. Real mayhem works best.
The possibility of dirty tricks like this surrounding Sandy Hook is just one scenario and it’s very hard and expensive to investigate. It’s easier for youtubers to make up fake sensations. To claim Emilie Parker is still alive, because there is a photo of her from after the shooting with president Obama. Well, turns out the photo shows the younger sister. Again, conspiracy theorists did not do the most basic fact checking. Immediately the fake story became viral.
Next were claims that the relatives of the dead are the same actors used in other tragedies like Aurora. Massively stupid. Black operations using the same actors in different places within a short timespan in that manner is ridiculous. People who believe this know very little about the nature of covert operations. The photo comparisons on the web reveal not a conspiracy but that conspiracy theorists habe no clue about identifying people and photography. The most superficial similiarities prove absolutely nothing. It’s just like the claim that Alex jones is Bill Hicks. Two white guys with brown hair, roughly the same age. You could do this same nonsense trick with the conspiracy theorists that talk about the Sandy Hook case. Take their photo and claim they are somebody else. It’ very reminiscent of witch hunting: You toss a tied up suspected witch into a lake and if she drowns she was a witch. It’s as unscientific as it gets.
Next: Adam Lanzas guns. A little confusion that was cleared up. Again, to prove tampering is hard. Much harder than just reading some news articles on the web and looking for inconsistencies.
Let’s look at the case of the Charlottesville attack which is the subject of a new lawsuit against Alex Jones and others. A man films the attck with his phone and the video goes viral. It’s bad PR for the rightwing and the right wing does not like bad PR. They want a conspiracy theory that blames somebody else. They want a scapegoat, a witch to burn at the stake. The man with the video is one of millions of Americans who worked for the government. Yes, he worked in a diplomatic role in foreign countries, yes he worked for a Democrat politician who got constributions from George Soros. Still it’s hard to make a case against him. A man who knew a man who knew George Soros or dealt with intermediaries of Soros is pretty thin. In legal terms and police investigative terms that’s almost nothing. Any self respecting black ops unit would have simply used intermediaries to pay off a few naive lefties to film the right wingers with smartphones. One of those naive lefties would have caught the car attack on video. Mission accomplished with a minimal number of people in the know. It makes absolutely no sense for George Soros or the deep state to use a man for the video who has ties so some politician who has ties to Soros.
Conspiracy theorists often know very little about what constitutes a solid lead or solid evidence. But Infowars and others cast a huge amount of suspicion against that man, only stopping short of calling him a definitive conspirator. And that was enough for the audience. They hate that man. They call him a witch and they want to burn him at the stake. Same with Pizzagate. The restaurant owner might be the next guy with a million dollar lawsuit against Alex Jones and others. There wasn’t even enough evidence for a search warrant or any other police action. Creepy paintings of tied up children won’t give you a warrant. But conspiracy theorists pretended as if they had almost solved the case and almost proven a conspiracy.
It’s illegal to defame and slander. Alex Jones knows this. And he thinks he knowns where the line is drawn. How far you can go. Its a simple tactic of saying: That person looks totally dirty and guilty without making the explicit claim of that person actually being guilty. With this little trick you could fabricate almost anything. If Jones had done proper journalistic work he would have told his audience: “Well, there’s some creepy innuendo about that Pizza restaurant and some creepy connections, but nothing solid so far.” The audience would have been severely disappointed. The audience would have screamed “Alex, you’re lame and weak. You’re too mainstream. We want to hear about a juicy conspiracy, and we weant to hear that Donald Trump and his people are going to mass arrest the guilty players.” And so the audience would have stopped clicking on Infowars reports, would not have bought Alex’ health products. The stream of money would have become thinner. There’s thousands of other conspiracy theorists on the web so the audience can just go elsewhere and find someone who tells them what they want to hear.
And Alex should know better about pointing fingers based on thin or no evidence, because he himself has been the target of that sort of thing. He had catholic guests on his show and some people called him a Vatican agent for that and launched a hate campaign. Jones does not talk like David Duke and some people called him a Zionist agent for that. Even Alex’ ex-wife was brought into this hate campaign because she has a distant jewish relative. It was a witch hunt. Alex received death threats by crazy and misguided conspiracy theorists.
Jones has been suspected of being a Russian agent and he was certainly very angry about that. In 2008 he started to flip on the subject of the Russian regime and he has been spreading a lot of favorable reporting about the Russian regime, even comparing the regime to the American revolutionary spirit of 1776. He describes Russia as a defensive, rational superpower with good intentions. I have criticized Jones heavily for this kind of reporting, however I have made it clear that there is no hard evidence for Jones being a Russian agent. He might be just misguided, he might just follow his gut feeling, he might be influenced by his sources. Him being an agent is just a hypothesis. I’m interested in his business dealings, any possible secret contract that might pay him as an “advisor”, offshore front companies. I have read a wide range of books on espionage and intel agencies. I know how hard it is to prove espionage. Many times it’s impossible. If there is a bank account in Russia or in some offshore tax haven used to pay off Jones we will probably never find out. I find his reporting on Russia terrible, dangerous and misleading, but anything beyond that is speculation at this point.
Jones knows how it feels to be the target of a hate campaign. Yet still he ran with terrible shoddy reports on Sandy hook and other cases. He fanned a witch hunt. And that has consequences. Somebody with an AR rifle went into that Pizzagate restaurant, looking for abused children. He’s now in jail.
Others, such as parents of the Sandy Hook tragedy or the man who filmed the Charlottesville attack, have been subjected to harassment and threats. They have to prove in court that the harassment was serious. That they suffered. They have to prove that Alex Jones failed in basic ways as a reporter, and they have to prove malicious intent, meaning intent to harm. The first two things are easy to proof. Harrassment leaves trails. Any judge will acknowledge that Sandy Hook was not a bunch of actors. But the third thing, intent to cause harm, is difficult to proof. They have to prove that Jones knew he was being manipulative. It’s legal to be stupid and incompetent and misguided. Some of these lawsuits will probably be settled with money. Jones could pay and read a prepared statement.
Other lawsuits probably will go to court and cause a lot of media attention. Jones would have to testify and he is lousy under cross examination. When he can’t control the setting, he’s faltering. His previous court case against his ex-wife showed that, and his disastrous interview with Megyn Kelly. She pressed him on his nonsense about Sandy Hook and he looked terrible. He tends to deflect, change the topic, distract, he starts a tirade and talks really fast about things with little or no connection to the actual topic being discussed and tries to sneak in his lies and misrepresentations. That is not going to work in court. He and his “reporters” will be pressed to explain: Why did you not do basic fact checking? How did these conspiracy videos were made? Did an employee voice doubt? What did Alex respond to that? Alex’ employees and former exployees who are also being sued might seek a deal and testify against Jones. They might (in my wild speculation and imagination) testify that they voiced doubts but Jones ordered them to run the story anyway. They might testify that Jones doubted the story himself but chose to run it anyway. If that happens, he is screwed. A judge or jury might count this as intention to cause harm. There is a legion of angry and disappointed former Alex Jones employees. Their testimony would not likely be positive. In a Buzzfeed story they anonymously slammed Jones as a shock jock who’s in for the money.
So we’re looking at serious potential trouble for Jones. Millions in damages and millions in legal fees. If he loses in court, more lawsuits by other people and organisations could follow and bankrupt him. He declared it costs around 7 million$ per year to run his company. So if he cannot find banks to loan him money or rich people to save him, he could hypothetically go broke. He probably stashed away money at some secret spot. He might leave the country and start over from there. He could go on declaring himself the Nelson Mandela or Jesus of alternative media. We know from his court case against his ex-wife that he is indeed narcissistic.
It would send shockwaves through alternative media if he loses more than one of these lawsuits. Everybody would have to scrub their own archives and modify their future reporting style. It would redefine the limits of the first amendment when it comes to investigative reporting. And then what? What is going to happen when the next 9/11 comes, some large attack, maybe cyber mixed with a super flu? There will be information chaos. The US will blame Russia and North Korea. Russia and North Korea will blame the US for a false flag. Alternative media will spin its wheels and go in circles. The US government will crack down hard on Russian propaganda. What will the conspiracy theorists do then, when their careers are on the line? We have to solve this mess now, before something really crazy happens:
- Read quality books on a variety of topics: Different intel agencies from different countries. Narcissistic disorder and antisocial disorder. The history of the British empire and the history of the Russian empire. Books on criminology and police investigations. Improve your knowledge.
- Be aware that even famous conspiracy theorists can be terrible people and can be terrible at their job. Don’t just trust someone and sympathize with him just because that person plays a role and makes a living with conspiracy theories.
- Demand transparency from youtubers, ideologists, bloggers etc. Ask them for a list of literature they have studied. Ask them to publish a believable list. Books that have clearly influenced them, books they have seriously quoted and covered in depth. Don’t fall for phony lists and unproven merits. Compare their work with what they claim to have studied. An academic title is not necessary but quality literature is a must.
- Don’t demand clickbait and outrageous claims. Demand quality.
- Don’t fall for group narcissism. Don’t fall for false promises. Trump or Putin are not going to save you.
- If somebody doubts your pet theory and criticizes it, don’t get angry and don’t automatically call the critic a conspirator. It’s a fact of life that you will encounter criticism.
- Avoid the left-right-paradigm and the East-West-paradigm like the plague. Even Gary Allen and Carroll Quigley called it fake decades ago. Read their actual books, not just snippets on the web.
- Be careful what you share online or what you post on YT or your blog. You might get caught sprading false damaging info.
I will cover any court cases involving Jones to elaborate further. I used to be a supporter years ago when Jones seemed kind of normal, before we found out about his narcissism and his family troubles, before he played the right vs. left game, before he did favorable reporting about the Russian regime, before he did silly reports like the one on Sandy Hook. After careful deliberation I am not a supporter any more. Unlike Jones, who admitted on his show that he read almost no books whatsoever during the last 10 years, I have read hundreds of books. I used to get some ideas from Jones in the past and some motivation but I never got my education from him.
I have been doing alternative media for 13 years, mainly in the German language realm and I know how bad it is with the narcissism and other forms of crazy. I know how nasty the fight for attention and money is. Many people who are as bad as Jones want his spot, they want to kick him when he’s down because he is in their way. I have been a guest on his show 2 or 3 times, when someone else was hosting. If I had pushed it I could have profited from a relationship with Infowars and gained some bigger attention. But I chose not to. While they were riding higher, I distanced myself further.
This might be the beginning of the end of Jones’ career or his dominant position, or he might find some creepy rich sponsors like the Mercer family and become even bigger and dependent on his sponsor. I am not a fortune teller. I have analytical skills, tons of book knowledge and experience. You can find me on this channel, on eng.recentr.com, social media and on Patreon. Plase subscribe, like and comment below to tickle the Google algorithms.
