During this mad election cycle we have covered a number of stories about ‘Wikileaked’ emails to John Podesta – one-time chief of Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concerning the UFO phenomenon. Some of the ‘rational’ crowd may have raised an eyebrow at this, but given that Podesta has long been known as a UFO tragic, and yet functions fine (or rather, at a very high level) regardless, it wasn’t exactly ground-breaking news.
The Clinton campaign though is not alone in having some people in high-level positions who are interested in ‘fringe’ topics. In a new Kindle ‘Single’ titled The Elephant in the Room, author Jon Ronson outlines how the Trump campaign has been influenced by conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones.
Ronson has a long history with Alex Jones – as part of the research for his book Them: Adventures with Extremists, the pair ‘broke into’ the infamous Bohemian Grove encampment and filmed a mock sacrificial rite. So when Ronson noticed Donald Trump praising Alex Jones during a campaign rally, he decided to track down Jones and talk to him about it. Why?
Donald Trump might be on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world, and it was incredible to discover that he takes Alex seriously – that Alex might be influencing him.
Alex is basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met. He uses his powers to inflame paranoia. He boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda. Alex eschews facts and reason and he definitely should not have political sway.
Ronson discovered that a number of Trump’s conspiratorial talking points seem to have originated directly from Jones’s monologues via his site Infowars.com: the ‘Hillary for Prison’ meme, and the ‘rigged election’, just two examples.
But how did Trump come to be paying attention to Alex Jones? Turns out the influence comes through Trump’s right-hand man, Roger Stone:
Stone’s beliefs, i later discovered, were just as crazy as Alex’s. He had advised Trump in 2011 that there were “a lot of questions” about President Obama’s birth certificate. He was forever juggling an array of malicious theories. Right now he was working on a book about how John F. Kennedy Jr. was murdered by the Clintons, while concurrently spreading a theory that Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin was a “Saudi asset”.
Jones’s crazy ideas about the Presidential election have even got some air-play from President Barack Obama, who had some fun with the theory that both Obama and Hillary were – literally – demons:
Anybody who has been around the fringe scene for a while (and I have) knows that Alex Jones is either as mad as a cut snake, or acts that way intentionally for showmanship purposes (or perhaps more likely, a little from column a, a little from column b). it is, once again, a sad indictment of the scene (and also, a large percentage of the US population) that it’s guys like Jones who end up earning money, and now gaining political power, due to the many thousands of fools that are suckered by his schtick and buy into it to confirm their own sad beliefs.
Link: The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the “Alt-Right”
