Unfortunately, those are some very difficult issues to get past, and they help explain much of my continuing ambivalence towards Jones. On balance, I have more admiration for him than almost any servile establishment bootlicker in the MSM, and my reasoning here is almost incidental to Jones' actual worldview, lying more in his spirit and philosophy. As official mythology would have it, journalists serve as a Fourth Estate, aggressively questioning government claims to protect citizens' rights to accurate information. And yet how many popular media figures today actually fulfill this criteria? Very, very few if we're talking about establishment American media. MSNBC has offered up some important exceptions, such as Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Dylan Ratigan and Ed Schultz, but the same network is largely a bastion of Village groupthink and conservative framing from the likes of Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. When not devoting countless hours of coverage to the latest tabloid celebrity garbage, CNN offers the ultimate stenographer journalists, who posit a false balance on every issue by always moderating between a conservative (meaning Republican) guest and "liberal" (meaning Democratic) guest.
Finally, there is an important wild card - the right-wing noise machine of talk radio and Faux News (or "The Lie Factory"). Although journalists should aggressively question government claims, this is not the same thing as using lies, smears, exaggerations and distortions to attack a government on all fronts simply for having a president with a (D) instead of an (R) after his name. Hannity, Beck and their ilk are not "entertainers", but rather poisonous propagandists who sadly manage to convince millions of followers that they are sincere truth-seekers rather than cynical careerists.
By contrast, I feel Alex Jones falls into the former category. He appears to truly believe what he says, and has consistently risked his neck to expose the truth behind secretive elitist organizations such as the Bohemian Grove, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, which are unknown to most of the general public but may have massive impacts on their lives. Although Noam Chomsky has dismissed the likes of the CFR as "nothing organizations", the indisputable truth is that almost every U.S. president of the 20th century was either a member of the CFR or had a cabinet dominated by its members. Regarding the Bilderberg Group, something important is being discussed when the most high-profile members of the world elite convene under secretive circumstances, if only because those guests play such an important role in the enactment of global policy. Alex Jones has a natural skepticism towards all government officials, foreign and domestic, and that quality puts him head and shoulders above most self-proclaimed "journalists" as an earnest seeker of truth.
I must note, however, that I do have some misgivings about Jones' approach. For example, there sometimes seems to be a slight element of self-serving commercialism, as his radio show continually drops the names of his websites while flogging DVDs and other Jones-related merchandise such as his "TyrannyCrusher 1" bullhorn (which, admittedly, I would like to own). However, I can easily look past this element; after all, Jones does not command the vast financial resources of his "mainstream" counterparts, and may require these alternate sources of revenue. In addition, Jones is a libertarian and has conservative leanings; he is an unabashed capitalist and so never claims to be above making an extra buck by selling merchandise.
Yet those same conservative leanings are ultimately the source of much more serious weaknesses in Jones' worldview - his belief that global warming is a hoax; his opposition to single-payer health care or even Obama's weak public option based on the talking point that it would constitute a government takeover of health care; and his America-centric take on everything, constantly invoking the Constitution and the Founding Fathers in a manner that idealizes the early United States while completely overlooking the fact that it was an actual slave society (ironic for such a firm opponent of feared modern slavery under the New World Order).
If I were more cynical than I already am, I might imagine that Alex Jones is carving out his own media niche by appealing to the "conspiracy-minded" on both the right and the left, thereby expanding his audience and creating an aura that he alone knows what's really going on, that he and his followers are above the "left-right paradigm" which everyone else so slavishly follows. Leave aside for a moment the false equivalency of this perspective. From a pure standpoint of audience appeal, in this way Jones can attract both "left-wing" listeners who believe that 9/11 was an inside job as well as "right-wing" listeners who hold that global warming is a hoax to destroy American sovereignty. Ultimately, I give Jones the benefit of the doubt because he does seem to truly believe what he's saying, but I still allow for the possibility of that more commercial perspective.
All these thoughts went through my head as I sat down to watch Fall of the Republic, Jones' latest film. As always, it's a mixed bag, one that gave me more cause for disagreement than his last work, The Obama Deception. At times it was frustrating, as Jones veered from moments of total brilliance to moments of forehead-slapping incredulity. His film was, at different times, both supremely informative and shockingly misinformative. Most of the factual discussion on the financial crisis, the Wall Street bailouts, and the flaws of the American two-party system was interesting and well-told. The interviews were highly enjoyable, particularly when the always-brilliant Max Keiser discusses the illusion of choice in the American political system by comparing the two corporate political parties, Democrats and Republicans, to other corporate duopolies such as Coke vs. Pepsi and McDonald's vs. Burger King.
There was other food for thought. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente gave a chilling preview of the dark prospects for America in the years ahead. Jones provides needed analysis of how the Obama "brand" (referencing an article by Chris Hedges) was marketed to an America desperate for change. There is an intriguing dissection of the media's role in infantilizing the masses, such as the construction of false tribal identities in males via professional sports - though Jones seems to be forgetting that bread and circuses have been used to distract the people since the gladiatorial bloodsport of Roman times. Finally, there is some discussion of the increasing powers of the American national-security complex, the rapid militarization of the state and the further curtailment of civil liberties under the Obama administration. These are absolutely vital issues that have been mostly ignored by mainstream media in both Canada and the United States, and illustrate why Jones has more legitimate claim to the title of journalist than most of his well-paid, well-coiffed "mainstream" counterparts.
Unfortunately, the film is derailed by the more unsavoury, paranoid aspects of Jones' worldview. Specifically, I refer to the film's discussion of global warming. Jones presents climate change deniers as heroes of free speech who are being categorically shushed through the elite's dominance of government and media. Most repellingly, Webster Tarpley, who has done some great research but has the same unfortunate tendency as Jones to embellish his accounts with dubious conspiratorial nonsense, equates scientists who hold that human activity is mainly responsible for global climate change with the pseudo-scientific garbage of Nazi race theorists.
Aside from his belief that 9/11 was an inside job, I have no more fundamental disagreement with Jones than his suggestion that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the elite, and the reason is simple: his argument makes no sense. If the global elite, which controls the government, Big Business and the media, is so gung-ho about battling climate change - if they've specifically invented this fake scientific consensus to use hysteria over global warming to impose massive carbon taxes and threaten citizens' individual rights - then why have those same governments been so slow on coming forward with any climate legislation at all, when they're not denying the problem's very existence (as Jones does)? Why does the corporate media - which, according to Chomsky's propaganda model, restricts debate to within the elite's own terms - consistently give airtime to those who deny climate change?
The simple fact is that governments are barely doing anything to address global warming, notwithstanding Obama's tepid cap-and-trade bill which calls for lowering greenhouse gas emissions only 4% over the next ten years. This doesn't exactly gel with Jones' theory that they've deliberately manufactured a hoax to enslave the human race and end American sovereignty. Here is the most serious factual error in Jones' whole film, originating in the right-wing elements of his ideology. It certainly doesn't help that he bolsters his case by incorporating footage of Republican members of Congress (including certified lunatic Michelle Bachmann) whose denial of climate change is roughly proportional to their level of campaign contributions from Big Oil.
The reason Jones' climate change denial grates on me so much is that he's correct on most other issues, particularly his characterization of the elite's corporate nature and his ultimately populist stance. But in this case, his own ideology prevents him from accepting the legitimacy of things like the UN report on climate change. After all, if something comes from the UN, it must be a fraud designed to serve the interests of the impending one-world government, right? That may prove to be a tragically misguided belief, because if the scientific consensus that global warming is caused primarily by human activity is sound, Jones is helping us doom the planet and its future generations to ecological catastrophe, the consequences of which we can't even begin to fully grasp. If you want to see someone who truly understands the importance and reality of this issue, and presents constructive ideas on how to cope with it, please read Naomi Klein's new article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It actually makes me believe we might summon the collective willpower to deal with such an unprecedented global threat, if we weren't so lazy and our governments weren't so greedy and corrupt.
So the climate change stuff kind of sinks Alex Jones' latest film. Nevertheless, I can't deny there's a lot of worthwhile stuff in there, and that's usually how it works with AJ. Because there's always a fair degree of truth in whatever he says, and because his heart is in the right place - i.e. because he legitimately challenges those in authority and awakens citizens to the need to question people in power - I will remain an Alex Jones fan. The fact that he's wrong on some issues merely reinforces the lesson that you can't trust any public personality completely, but must do your own research and make up your own mind. Jones has always encouraged this in his listeners, and whatever you may think of his particular brand of politics, that is some indisputably good advice.
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