Decent read, that. Not much I hadn't already figured out/remembered myself, but good to see someone in the press acknowledging how much they (along with the rest of our political establishment) have fucked themselves in this circus.

All I know is someone stickers the back of stop signs around town, I've never actually met anyone who buys Alex Jones. Shit, I knew one guy who 100% believed in "ancient aliens" shit AND was a truther, and even he thought Jones (and Icke) were full of shit.

The person I know who eats this kind of thing up is far less consistent in their narrative than Alex Jones is. Alex can be all over the map, but so long as he makes a single connection to loosely tie them all in, it's solid enough for the crazies. Alex basically just communicates to them in emotion words tied to words they might see in other contexts to trigger the crazy.

This ties into a convo I had with someone about how the Internet has made a consistent warped worldview for the schizophrenics and paranoids of Western civilization they never had before in history.

"Serious" conspiracy people view Jones as a disinfo agent whose job is to make them lose credibility by association. Like, a shocking number of people will watch everything Jones produces and then relate this opinion to anyone who asks.

I really want to make fun of your "serious" conspiracy people idea, but.... unfortunately, I know exactly the kind of people you're referring to.

Every time I'm reminded I share a democratic country with those kinds of people makes me think of this onion article: http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/yee-haw-my-vote-cancels-out-yalls -11030

OK, like, here's an example of what I'm talking about:
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=151277

Alex has been running in Truther circles for years, since at least the height of the Bush era (so it's not like he's -always- been a Republican party shill). Alex has flirted for years with ideas like: 9/11 was an inside job, the security-industrial complex is out of control, the war on terror is a sham meant to deprive us of our civil liberties etc etc. In fact, these ideas form the core of his journalistic presence.

And yet, here we have a candidate who is telling the public, straight-up, that if elected he will be Obama 3.0. And Infowars is suddenly fine with this...?

I'd be curious to know what evidence, if any, there is to suggest Alex Jones is working as a disinformation agent. I've always assumed that Alex Jones does what he does simply because he's a performer and a businessman: he tailors his show to cater to precisely the middle-ground of whereever the anti-authoritarian community has shifted this week. So it'd be interesting to see what happens if Trump gets into White House, and opposing corporatist imperialism once again becomes (at least in mainstream discourse) a meme of the "lunatic left" rather than the "radical right". Will Infowars go back on its support for Trump? Will Alex release a documentary entitled "The Trump Deception"? Or will he continue doing things like feeding into mass media disease scares and race-baiting against immigrant workers?