Generally, anything and everything said by Alex Jones can be happily ignored. He is well-known for making some truly extraordinary and utterly absurd claims that are bereft of any evidence. In other words …
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur
If somebody presents a claim, but provides no evidence for it, then it can be dismissed. It is not your responsibility to argue against something that has not actually been verified in any way at all.
Controversies
Mr Jones is your classic shock jock who is driven by the need to provoke a reaction and so truth, honesty, integrity, or for that matter, evidence, are all very much out of scope. Specific examples of his claims includes …
- The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a false flag operation run by the US government
- The Oklahoma City bombing was orchestrated by the US government
- 9/11 was … well yes, you can guess.
- The Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in Syria was a hoax
- etc…
His trademark is that of the angry guy who shouts and yells. A rather revealing example of that is this …
On June 9, 2013, Jones appeared as a guest on the BBC‘s television show Sunday Politics, during a discussion about conspiracy theories surrounding the Bilderberg Group meetings with presenter Andrew Neil and journalist David Aaronovitch. A critic of such theories, Aaronovitch implied that they either do not exist or that Jones is a part of them himself. Jones began shouting and interrupting, and Andrew Neil ended the interview, describing Jones as “an idiot”[66] and “the worst person I’ve ever interviewed”.[67][68] According to Neil on Twitter, Jones was still shouting until he knew that he was off-air.[66][67]
It would tend to very much illustrate that he is simply putting on an act when the cameras are pointing in his direction.
I’m perhaps in some ways reminded of the tale of somebody picking up a copy of some sermon notes and discovering that at one point the fire and brimstone minister had scribbled in the margin at one point, “argument weak, shout loudly here“.
Alex Jones Custody Case
The specific item that motivates me to write about Alex Jones concerns a rather revealing insight that has come to light via his on-going custody case. He had three kids with his ex-wife Kelly Jones whom he divorced in 2015. In the past few weeks she started a lawsuit seeking custody of those three kids, and the argument for this was as follows …
“He’s not a stable person,” she said of the man with whom her 14-year-old son and 9- and 12-year-old daughters have lived since her 2015 divorce. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.
“I’m concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress,” she said, referring to his recent comments about California Democrat Adam Schiff. “He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast.”
Now here comes the kicker. As a rebuttal, his lawyer Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that it is all an act …
using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”
“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”
Who would be actually gullible enough to buy into his BS?
Rather a lot of people, and surprise surprise, that includes the new new President of the United States …
During the campaign and into his presidency, many of Trump’s most defining themes and questionable assertions either originated with or were popularized by Infowars: Hillary Clinton for prison. Hillary Clinton is gravely ill. Bill Clinton is a rapist. President Barack Obama founded ISIS. The election is rigged. Millions of immigrants voted illegally. The news media covers up terrorist attacks. The “fake news media … is the enemy of the people.” Obama spied on Trump.
In December 2015, thanks to Stone, Trump appeared via Skype on Jones’ show.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones. “I will not let you down.”
Since Trump became president, Jones has purported on air to be in regular direct telephone contact with the president, apologizing for not always being able to answer the phone when the president calls. Last week, Jones said that the president had invited him to Mar-a-Lago
Influence
His YouTube channel has over 2 million subscribers and more than 1.5 billion views. He broadcasts on over 150 radio stations and has millions of global listeners tuning in each month. His InfoWars brand is not only potent, but is also so commercially valuable and that it has perhaps trapped him within this bubble of misinformation and paranoid fiction. Truth and honesty are very much out of scope because that would seriously damage the brand.
Should we ever believe him?
Those that follow him might indeed view him as a prophet for our age and buy into much of what he says, but what this trial reveals is that he himself is telling you that he is simply a showman and that it is all an act. If indeed when he himself says in a court of law that it is all a sham and that he plays a role, then this is perhaps the one time to take him at his word and believe him.
Will those that hang off his every word do that now?
Probably not, they are too deeply invested emotionally to be able to come to terms with it all being a con.
Seeing the headline I predicted, correctly, the author of this post would include Alex Jones’s 9/11 position along side the many other things Jones comments on. Dave, the post author, has a bias against the calls for an real investigation into 9/11.
He has authored another post, under Critical Thinking, in which Dave does little of that and actually engages in the exact same sort of thinking Alex Jones uses to justify his positions, personal biases, innuendo, ad hominem criticism of those he disagrees with. I have commented at length in that post on 9/11, and I encourage anyone interested to view the arguments I have with how Dave has addressed an issue he knows so little about personally.
Regarding Alex Jones’s position on 9/11, I know very little about how he approaches it as I find the man’s methodology, logic, and presentation completely without merit. I know he has a following who also follow the 9/11 truth thinking in one form or another, but there are many forms that thinking has taken, some of which, being absolutely bizarre and unsupported. Some sort of space ray destroying the towers is one very fanciful but absolutely nonsensical notion some have offered. Others offer some sort of low yield nukes, also absolute nonsense. Nothing in the available evidence that informs myself, or the authors of a Fall 2016 article on 9/11 in the European Physical Society membership magazine, Europhysics News, which Dave criticizes in his other post, supports such fanciful nonsense. The publishers of Europhysics News instead refer to the article they featured as “important” given the times we live in, and “sufficiently technical” to warrant publication. Dave dismisses the article as speculation, misrepresenting a disclaimer posted on the Europhysics News article by the publisher.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say, so reviling Alex Jones’s position on many, many things is entirely appropriate, and I will heartily agree with honest criticism of him and his material. Deliberately including his position on 9/11, as Dave does, to deliberately reinforce his own misguided and callous criticism of the science by the 9/11 truth community, which challenges the non-science used to support the government narrative, is nothing more than the same faulty logic that folks like Alex Jones apply to their unsupported conspiratorial thinking. Delegitimizing work not on the merit of the work but on who they are is not sound criticism in any honest forum of criticism.
The only, and last, thing I have ever actually heard from Alex Jones that appeared the least bit credible was when he featured prominently in a BBC documentary some time in the 1980’s being interviewed about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an unarmed communications vessel cruising in the eastern Mediterranean, killing several crew members.
It strikes me as a tad odd to be writing a rather long comment all about 9/11 under a posting that has nothing to do with 9/11 conspiracy theories. But hey, I get it, you feel very very strongly about this.
For those curious to peruse the article that I wrote last year that Stephen refers to, here is a link to it. I’ll comment no further on this, and will instead leave it to the curious to click that link and see what was actually written and come to their own conclusions. There are rather a lot of comments under that, over 160 to be precise.
You included a reference in your post. And we both know why.
You know, logically, there are no comparisons that can be made between pure speculation, without a scrap of written or empirical evidence, a view point based entirely on pure animus, prejudice, and wild conjecture, as in the Newtown massacre conspiracy, the faked moon landing, or say the chemical attack in Syria to which a layman has no access to inside information and the considered critical analysis of thousands of pages of a scientific study, more than one, thousands of public access videos, photographs, eyewitnesses, news reports, government officials’ public statements….
There is nothing logical in making that sort of argument and believing that making such a comparison stand as sufficient, prima facie evidence the considered critical analysis is on par with the completely unsubstantiated fantasy conspiracy. What is fascinating to me is people do it all the time without thinking how illogical it is.