Alex Jones Is a Crazy Kook and That’s Why I Like Him
This post was originally published on the Minds platform in 2018-shortly after the purge of Alex Jones from most social media sites, including Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.
I’ve always liked InfoWars. It’s one of those guilty pleasures that I don’t necessarily advertise. I’ve always been a sucker for a little absurdity. Nothing breaks up the hum-drum of the daily grind than learning that the US government is running experiments on gay frogs in the Amazon, or about alien invaders from the 5th dimension.
These sorts of fantastic tales presented loosely as truth are endemic to growing up and learning what’s real and what’s not. More importantly, they teach the basics of how to distinguish genuine information apart from sensational bullshit.
When I was growing up, there wasn’t yet an InfoWars, but there was a Weekly World News and and a Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. There was also WWF wrestling. These shows also presented fiction as truth, and it was fun to read these crazy stories. I also remember being young enough to believe some of it.
The crazy soap opera that was the WWF (now the WWE, of course) had a huge influence on me, simply because I believed it, and it turned out to be bullshit. And yet, even when the veil was lifted, and the man behind the curtain was revealed, it somehow didn’t matter. I willfully, for a time, set the curtain back and allowed myself to enjoy the show. It doesn’t have to be real; being entertaining is good enough.
Part of the fun, even as an adult, is entertaining the idea that the stories might be true. Getting high with friends and mulling over an escaped bat-boy, or chem trails subtly calming a populace into complacency in the face of oppression are some of my fondest memories of adolescence. I experience the same sensation now when I get roped into some conversation with a flat-earther or 911-truther. I don’t always attempt to talk them out of their crazy theories. Sometimes I’m just enthralled with the idea itself and let whomever it is explain their little red-pill moment.
It’s just fun.
Now, I know the opposing view to this is the harassment of the parents at Sandy Hook or grisly murders in New York pizza parlors. To me these are lousy examples, as there are plenty of other examples of crazy people being crazy because they believed the wrong things. People blow up hospitals because their religious beliefs tell them that abortion is worse. John Hinckley stalked Jodie Foster after becoming obsessed with her character in Taxi Driver and shot a president to impress her. We haven’t banned the movie, or other movies about obsessive people with mental illness.
In the early 90s there were stories of children getting lost in big-city sewer systems looking for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-28/local/me-1208_1_ninja-turtles. Does this imply that we should be banning stories with characters in sewers in order protect children who are improperly parented?
Should we ban dark movies with violent themes because sometimes, people copy those violent ideas? Should we ban hip hop because sometimes there’s gang violence, or heavy metal because of Satanism?
Should we ban Islam because of Hijabs and FGM?
Should we ban Christianity because of the Westboro Baptist Church?
Should we ban the X-Files because of the Heaven’s Gate Cult?
There’s reasons to ban anything you like, if you can feign the proper outrage, and persuade others to do the same. But in sanitising the world, we lose so much more. We lose pieces of our culture, bit by bit. You might not find value in Heavy Metal, as Tipper Gore didn’t, but millions do, and their lives would be less without it. The same can be said for any of the examples I’ve used, and the same can be said for Alex Jones and InfoWars.
Does Alex spread lies and present it as truth? Yes. What modern media company doesn’t in this era of click-bait news? It’s irrelevent. Tell a story-any story- and somebody, somewhere, will be convinced that it’s the truth. And maybe what they do with that idea will turn violent. These things are unpredictable. But if we take away all of this culture, including stories of strange conspiratorial fantasies, just to appease a populace that’s afraid boogeymen are around every corner, we lose ourselves in the process.
We forget how to grow up.
Originally published at http://candidapples0.wordpress.com on October 30, 2023.
