If ‘Crazy’ Were a Political Philosophy, Its Spokesman Would Be Alex Jones
Posted on | January 9, 2013 | 42 Comments
Does any sane person take Alex Jones seriously, except as a deranged menace?
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 8, 2013
Remember when Alex Jones sicced a mob of kooks on Michelle Malkin during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver?
“She wants to put us in camps!”
Crazy is not a political philosophy, and neither is anger. So, naturally, when anti-gun fanatic Piers Morgan wants a “typical” spokesman for Second Amendment rights, he brings on the permanently angry Alex Jones, who begins his rant with some signifying jive:
“[W]e did it to point out that this is globalism, and the mega banks that control the planet and brag they have taken over — in Bloomberg, AP, Reuters, you name it — brag that they’re going to get our guns as well. They’ve taken everybody’s guns, but the Swiss and the American people and when they get our guns, they can have their world tyranny while the government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in U.S. skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.”
Your key phrase there is “mega banks that control the planet.” This is classic kook-talk, the kind of paranoid stuff like Zeitgeist that inspired Jared Loughner. Recall that Zeitgeist not only demonized bankers, but also suggested that 9/11 was a hoax.
These are the ideas that circulate on the kook fringe, and Alex Jones first became notorious as a promoter of 9/11 Truther craziness.
His appetite for kook-fringe conspiracy theories discredits Alex Jones, as does his implacable raging anger. The only reason Piers Morgan had Jones on CNN was in order to discredit the Second Amendment by saying, “See how dangerously crazy these gun nuts are?”
Ranting about the “New World Order” doesn’t win arguments.
UPDATE: Allahpundit:
Last night’s cable-news car crash reminded me of how reporters used to go to tea-party rallies and seek out the nuttiest people they could find for self-discrediting quotes and photos. A cheap tactic to smear the whole group, but an effective one. Took Morgan awhile but somehow he figured out that insulting soft-spoken gun-rights advocates to their faces is less persuasive than letting a guy famous for 9/11 conspiracy theories shriek about guns and 1776 and the New World Order on camera for 15 minutes.
Hey, if Glenn Beck thinks you’re a paranoid kook . . .
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