We need to talk about Alex.
We here at the Daily Grail are no strangers to ‘alternative’ news – it is, after all, pretty much, the site’s raison d’être: to keep our eyes on the fringes of the current paradigm, looking for new and interesting ideas (although we’re happy to stop and have a laugh together at some of the stranger things out there too).
And, having been in this website business for 20 years, we have an understanding of the prime techniques used to build a big, loyal audience, and make money off the back of it – and we have strenuously avoided them at all costs. Because those techniques are awful:
1) Appeal to your core audience’s belief systems/ideologies by constantly reinforcing them, and casting yourself as the leading promoter and defender of those beliefs.
2) Keep your audience in constant fear that people opposed to their ideology and beliefs are coming for them, in order to keep them ‘huddled under your wing’.
3) Use sensationalism and outright fiction to reinforce #1 and #2, in order that you have amazing content that nobody else does.
We see these techniques regularly in other sites in the ‘fringe’ world, and one of the worst abusers of them through the years has been InfoWars.com. But in the last few years, awful exploitation has turned into – in our opinion – something more dangerous.
Disinfo Whores
Let’s look at a single example as illustration – although, in reality, you could have a full-time job analysing the problems with InfoWars content. Last week, InfoWars published an article written by Paul Joseph Watson, who has in recent years quite successfully stepped out of the shadow of his mentor Alex Jones (PJW now has 885,000 followers on Twitter – 60,000 more than Jones himself).
The article’s title is “REVEALED: UN PLAN TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH 600 MILLION MIGRANTS”, with a sub-title reading “By 2050, 73% of population would be immigrants or their descendents”. It is based on a U.N. strategy document that looks at the looming problems associated with ageing populations around the world, and whether migration could help alleviate some of those.
600 million migrants pouring into America by 2050! Those are, as Watson says on his Twitter account, “absolutely crazy numbers”, and surely can’t be real? But, yes, America is about to be flooded with migrants because, according to the InfoWars article, the UN strategy paper says that…
…mass migration to the west is needed for governments to maintain “many established economic, social and political policies and programmes”.
The strategy document sets out six potential scenarios for each country or region of the world necessary to meet this goal.
Under the most severe scenario, large numbers of migrants will be required to “maintain the potential support ratio” (of a population) at the highest level.
What InfoWars and Watson don’t tell you, in the article, or in their tweets, is that the U.N. strategy document quite clearly also says that ‘Scenario 6’ – which forms the basis for the InfoWars article – is not a viable plan!
This scenario is clearly not realistic; therefore, immigration cannot prevent ageing of the population.
So why did the U.N. even include that scenario, InfoWars readers will no doubt respond, unless the U.N. was really sending a coded message to the Globalist elite letting them know the secret plan they need to pursue, amirite?
Actually, that too is explained in the document: each of the scenarios was simply based around mathematically matching various benchmarks and/or targets to see what numbers were produced – in the case of Scenario 6, the “crazy numbers” are a result of that scenario being ‘tasked’ with figuring out what level of migration would be needed to continue to match 1995 levels:
Scenario VI keeps the potential support ratio at its 1995 level, which was 4.3 for the European Union, 4.8 for Europe, 4.1 in Italy and the United Kingdom, 5.6 in the Russian Federation and 12.6 in the Republic of Korea. The total number of migrants needed to keep the potential support ratio constant until 2050 is extremely large in all countries.
It is on the basis of these figures that the paper then notes that “Scenario VI is clearly not realistic”. Furthermore, in the conclusion, it notes that:
Such high levels of migration have not been observed in the past for any of these countries or regions. Moreover, it seems extremely unlikely that such flows could happen in these countries in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it appears inevitable that the populations of the low-fertility countries will age rapidly in the twenty-first century.
As a result, rather than proposing a flood of migrants into the U.S. and Europe, the strategy paper actually dismisses it as an option, then discusses other possible solutions for dealing with the problem of an ageing population, such as the (admittedly also rather unpalatable) idea of raising the ‘working-age span’.
In fact, contrary to Watson’s claim that the U.N. was going to carelessly flood America with migrants, not only does the paper say that scenario isn’t feasible, it even takes care to note that “international migration can provide countries of destination with needed human resources and talent, but may also give rise to social tensions”, and as such “effective international migration policies must therefore take into account the impact on both the host society and countries of origin”.
In short, the InfoWars article is *complete rubbish*, fear-mongering claptrap that demonizes migrants and the U.N. Now, Paul Joseph Watson quite obviously can read, and I know he can interpret things correctly when it suits his purposes. So he’s not ignorant: which makes articles like this even worse, because he obviously knows he is peddling bullshit to readers – but does it anyhow.
(It’s also a shame he turns this into an awful fear-mongering exercise against the UN and migrants, when the paper has a lot of points worth discussing about the serious issues we face in the near future related to a massive, ageing population.)
Actions Have Consequences
Why is this important? Because readers of websites trust you as an information source, and often don’t read the original documents. And a quick browse of the InfoWars comments section (*shudder*) makes clear that all those ‘woke’ folk didn’t read it, because there’s just a whole lotta racism and anti-U.N. talk.
Instead, Watson and InfoWars have simply used those three points I mentioned earlier, to reinforce people’s beliefs, set up an enemy, and employ misinformation to turn a sensible strategy paper into some grand conspiracy by the U.N. to flood America with brown people.
And it’s this latter part that is the most disturbing to me. There is no shortage of unethical websites using these techniques. But InfoWars headlines, and the Twitter feeds of Jones and Watson, have become a straight-up cascade of fear-porn, all about keeping their readers in a perpetual state of terror that everyone (though mostly ‘Globalists’, brown people, and liberals) is out to get them. And it has been pushing these agendas so hard that it has, in my eyes, now moved into the realm of hate speech and incitement to violence against others – we are not far off the moment when people might be killed by an InfoWars fan.
Just taking a look under the article I’ve referenced reveals comments such as “Violent civil war is coming. We are preparing in socal to fight the ((Globalists)) and the invaders.”, and “Gonna take a lot of ammo to reduce the number of immigrants to something sustainable…..like zero.”
How many of these people are willing to step beyond being just ‘keyboard warriors’? Alexandre Bissonnette, who killed six men at a mosque in Quebec in 2017, reportedly checked the Twitter accounts of Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson regularly in the weeks before his shooting rampage. And there is the very real case of the ‘Pizzagate’ gunman who entered a pizza store and fired his weapon after becoming enraged by a conspiracy pushed by Alex Jones about an alleged pedophilia ring in Washington D.C. headed up by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta (I have seen no shortage of comments on various sites about finding Podesta and killing him, purely on the basis of this conspiracy theory.)
What you write has consequences, and the awful stream of hate-filled lies that is constantly being produced by InfoWars (why, simply for money?) is contemptible and dangerous. Unfortunately though, it is a website that now has huge reader numbers, and as such has introduced a pathological mind virus of racism, irrational conspiracism, and possible future violence into the population. I genuinely fear what the end result of their awfulness is going to be.
Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and everyone else at InfoWars should be ashamed of who they are and what they do. They are a disgrace.
