Bill Weir, the show's host, gives a short intro before airing the piece, saying, "If you ever stand on a street corner, hollering that the government is poisoning our water supply, you'll probably get little more than eye-rolls and head-shakes, but do the same thing in a radio booth, and you might just get a million listeners a day. Such is the case for Alex Jones, a man who trades in such sinister conspiracy theories, you have to wonder if he really believes half of what he says." The immediate image that comes to mind when the anchor says a "if you ever stand on a street corner - hollering" is the classic archetype of the end-of-the-world street preacher/doomsayer who is seen in such films as John Carpenter's They Live, played by Raymond St. Jacques. Right away, the ABC propaganda team wants us to have in our minds that this next report is about a crazy person, a conspiracy nut, who just happens to have a show that reaches one million listeners every day. It's a nice use of subliminal messaging, and unsophisticated minds frequently fall for such propaganda, and subtle image-making.
The entire report is based on the assumption that all the things that Alex talks about every day are created in his own paranoid mind, and that they have no relation with the world that ABC viewers inhabit. Harris acts more like a cultural anthropologist than a news reporter. He is visiting Alex's natural habitat, and finding out what he is like, what he really believes, what he thinks of his listeners; questions that a civilized university researcher would ask a leader of a primitive tribe in Africa. The image ABC wants to express to their viewers is that Alex is uneducated and uncivilized, an insurgent in our society, and a man with low morals, who is not interested in informing his countrymen and the citizens of this world, but in dark entertainment. One segment of the report shows Alex outside the studio, talking about the good times that he has with his family and children, as if to say that Alex makes a good living at conning his audience, but at the end of the day, he is not serious about his beliefs, he is just like the rest of us, except his day job is a talk show conspiracy nut.
But this depiction falls flat. Almost entirely of what Alex talks about on his radio show every day is documented fact. On the day of 9/11 he said 9/11 was an inside job, stating what's now an obvious truth. Calls for a new 9/11 investigation have grown thanks to his dedication to truth-telling. Today, members of Parliament, scientists, engineers, professors, journalists, fire-fighters, members of the military, veterans, have all pledged their support for a new 9/11 investigation. In reality, it doesn't matter what Harris or ABC say about Alex Jones because they have zero credibility. As Paul Joseph Watson, and Kurt Nimmo write:
"Jones is depicted not as a journalist, but as an entertainer and a purveyor of “paranoia porn,” as if his entire career is just one big sideshow, something to be scoffed at by real intellectuals who watch ABC News. The problem with this smear is the fact that ABC News, along with almost every other establishment media network, is hemorrhaging viewers because their credibility is shot."The piece marked another low-point for corporate news in the United States. Harris never asked for evidence for Alex's claims that 9/11 was an inside job, or that top Goldman Sachs officials criminally profited from the ignorance of the public. He arrogantly assumed that everything Alex has spoken about is nonsense, and attributed his fact-based claims to some kind of cultural psychosis that he, and his listeners suffer from. It was purely character assassination, nothing more, nothing less.
According to ABC News, anybody who listens to Alex Jones is either an ignorant dupe, or crazy. But that characterization is more applicable to their viewers, and themselves. I don't know if they're hardcore propagandists, or if they are naive children who really believe in their own crap about the U.S. government being honest and good. Have they drank their own poison? What else explains their refusal to look at the evidence about 9/11? Whatever they believe, it doesn't matter, because their approach to news is based on an outdated model. They still think that because people are uninformed about the world around them they will uncritically accept their "late-night news reports" as gospel. But the world is bigger than what ABC says it is. TV is dead. The internet is king. And the world is not a dark place, but it is influenced by very dark, and manipulative people; people like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Poppy Bush; people who Dan Harris and the rest of the hobos on Nightline never interview, or if they do, never ask the tough questions.
In Praise of Alex Jones's Mission To Report The Truth
Alex Jones is the most trusted man in America because he has constantly reported the truth about 9/11, the militarization of Western society, the criminal Bernie-Madoff types who control Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and a host of other important issues. And the reason for his success is because he does not have a huge ego like Glenn Beck. His success is not about him, it's about truth, justice, and freedom. He's a symbol. His popularity stems from his truth-telling. And he frequently invites on his show informative guests from around the world like Pakistan's General Hamid Gul, CIA veteran Ray McGovern, Iceland's MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, journalist Greg Palast, Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, and 9/11 family members. Has ABC's Nightline ever interviewed any of these people? The answer is revealing.
Greg Palast called Alex "a national treasure," and "a light breaking through the electronic Berlin Wall of the US media establishment." Nobody in the global media can hold a candle to Alex Jones, and much to the displeasure of the ABC news crew, he's not going away. An outspoken critic of the ruthless conspiracy in Washington, he represents the awakening of the American mind. His work every day is a political act. It helps Americans reclaim their national memory, and heritage as the rebels of the world. "The politics of memory," says Andrzej Waśkiewicz, a professor at the University of Warsaw, is "the shaping of a collective vision of the past." Poland under Communist rule had lost contact with its past, until the arrival of the Solidarity movement in September 1980, which "was the first non-communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country." More from Wikipedia:
"In the 1980s it constituted a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s and several years of political repression, but in the end it was forced to start negotiating with the union."Waśkiewicz says that the Solidarity movement defeated the propaganda of the Communist regime, and acted for social justice based on a historical and truthful narrative of the past, a narrative that the lying state media was too powerless to oppose. In his essay, "The Polish Home Army and the Politics of Memory," that appears in the journal East European Politics and Societies, Waśkiewicz writes:
"With the advent of the Solidarity movement of 1980–81, a spontaneous process of "reclaiming" national memory started. The communist propaganda was not able to prevent it in any way and in fact did not even try. In a rather unusual move, the striking shipyard workers demanded historical truth at school and in the media. However, Solidarity was not only a trade union; it soon became a national movement and the protector—in lieu of the state—of civil society. Solidarity broke the state monopoly in the media, as it published its own weekly and also weakened the grip of censorship; from that time on, each deletion by a censor was marked in print. Self-censorship practically ceased," (1).In totalitarian societies citizens are filled with wrong memories of the recent past, and any deviation from the government narrative is social taboo. In America, the US media can't deal with the fact that JFK was murdered by rogue agents in the CIA, so they call anyone who holds such a view a conspiracy nut, and they can't face up to the fact that the U.S. shadow government did 9/11, so they don't even talk about it. Their failure to inform the American people about government crimes is why the work of Alex Jones, and a lot of other people in the truth and government accountability movement, is heroic. The people of America, and of the West, are reclaiming their recent history, and the psychopaths in charge of the U.S. shadow government can't stand it. If their propaganda fails, then they will resort to force, but at that point the facade will quickly die away, and they will be seen for what they are: cold-blooded murderers.
America's current leaders are more like Roman leaders during its decline than America's founding leaders. The American people, and this is also true of people in other Western countries, are not told the truth, but treated like children to be entertained, and slaves to be treated with contempt. The voice of citizens is not heard in Washington, or London, or Ottawa. They are ignored, and their trust in the system is abused by the political and financial elite.
But our age is not unique. The ignorant plebs have been hated, and deceived by the establishment classes throughout history, with a few notable exceptions. The Roman elite played directly to the delusions of regular Roman citizens who believed that their voices mattered, and gave them every opportunity to express their popular will during elections, and in public arenas so that the legitimacy of Roman institutions was maintained. But, the people were mere spectators. And so are much of the people today in many countries, including America, China, England, Canada, Israel, and Iran.
But some things have changed. In the modern era more and more individuals are realizing that politics is all spectacle. Leaders like Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Blair are viewed as actors more than anything else. In the 21st century people are no longer spectators, instead, they are taking the power of the media into their own hands. Alex Jones figured this out in the 1990s. He started a radio show, went on public access television, created websites, and made documentaries. And his media empire has grown because he is dedicated to the truth, justice, and freedom, not because he's shrewd and his listeners are gullible. The opposite is the case. Viewers of the "so-called mainstream media" as ABC's Harris put it, are the gullible dupes. And ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox News/CNN are the crazy villains in this historical drama, not Alex Jones, or any other truth-teller.
Notes:
1. Waśkiewicz, A. (February 2010). The Polish Home Army and the Politics of Memory. East European Politics and Societies, 24 (1), pg. 44-58. (Pg. 51-52).
