The Wallace Connection

It's time to examine some of the people and organizations who have influenced and mentored Alex Jones, starting with two seminal figures of the conspiracy world, G. Edward Griffin and Gary Allen...

The Creature from Jacka** Island

Yesterday's guest, G. Edward Griffin, is best-known as the author of the anti-Federal Reserve book The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994). He is a longtime member of the John Birch Society.

It's not as well-known that Griffin was a speechwriter for George Wallace's '68 presidential campaign. He wrote for Wallace's running-mate, Curtis LeMay, the general infamous for writing in his autobiography just three years earlier that the U.S. would bomb North Vietnam "back into the Stone Age". It's generally believed that LeMay was the inspiration for fluoride-phobic Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove. But LeMay was a study in contradictions; despite his rabid anti-Communism, he was close friends with Mao.

LeMay wasn't Wallace's first choice; he wanted Kentucky governor and former baseball commissioner Happy Chandler. But Birchers like Griffin kicked up a fuss because Chandler had supported the Brooklyn Dodgers' hiring of Jackie Robinson. Major campaign contributor and Bircher Nelson Bunker Hunt demanded that Wallace make Ezra Taft Benson his running mate, but Wallace ignored him.

Throughout the '60s, Griffin produced documentaries about how much Communism and capitalism suck. You'd think that would leave only socialism, but he hates that too. Like all Birchers, he also hates the UN.

In 1974 he wrote a promotional book about Laetrile as the cure for cancer, A World Without Cancer. Jason Bermas recommended it on yesterday's show. In the book, Griffin accused John D. Rockefeller of suppressing this "cure".

In the '90s Griffin became a champion of Ron Wyatt's and David Fasold's theory that Noah's Ark is at the Durupinar site in Turkey, throwing in some Velikovsky-style catastrophism about the Biblical Flood being caused by a large celestial body approaching Earth. I've never quite understood "arkeology". I won't get into the reality of the Flood right now, but there are practical issues to consider. For instance, why wouldn't Noah and fam cannibalize the ark for its wood? Even the Mayflower ended up as a barn, and the pilgrims weren't exactly reconstructing the whole world from scratch.

Anyway, Fasold's radar readings were never duplicated, and Fasold himself came to believe the site was merely a natural formation and "the oldest running hoax in history". Yet Griffin continued to champion the site.

None Dare Call it Bullsh**

In the very first minute of Alex Jones's very first documentary, America: Destroyed by Design, Jones praised Gary Allen's book 1974 book None Dare Call it Conspiracy and New American magazine.

The late Gary Allen, like G. Edward Griffin, was a longtime member of the John Birch Society. And New American is the society's publication.

Allen was also a speechwriter for George Wallace.

And he served as an advisor to the Wallace supporter mentioned earlier, Nelson Bunker Hunt. Bunker Hunt went on to lose his fortune trying to corner the world market in silver in the '80s. Prior to that, he contributed huge sums to The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, a fund-raising organization that was heavily implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. Somehow, he has managed to recoup most of his fortune in just 20 years.

I strongly suspect he was the primary inspiration for Larry Hagman's character in Nixon. No wonder Gary Allen wrote about "Cowboys" (oil tycoons) vs. "Indians" (Eastern Establishment politicos) in None Dare Call it Conspiracy.

I haven't read NDCIC, but I know about its enduring popularity. A friend was reading it just last month. And largely gushing Amazon reviews give some hints of its appeal in the conspiranoia community, as well as its flaws:

"He believes that the Anti Defamation League was set up just to protect the Rothschilds from criticism."

"He gives an account of how in 1964, David Rockefeller "sacked" Nikita Krushchev. Hardly anything in the USSR was produced without US. patents and machinery. The USSR was sold American arms and components to kill US soldiers in Vietnam."

To be fair, one reviewer makes a rather sensible obversation that will wrap up this post nicely. I support states' rights, but as this person points out, there are certain conditions in which federal intervention becomes necessary - and it's guys like George Wallace and the '60s-era Birchers who create those conditions:

"he decries the limitations that were imposed upon the right of State Governments to decide their own affairs, during the Civil Rights Era...During the Civil Rights Era the powers of the Federal Government were expanded to end segregation. Well, should the Federal Government have stood by and done nothing while atrocities against African Americans were being perpetrated?...The truth is that Southern Governors helped to place limitations upon the rights of States to decide their own affairs, by giving the Federal Government a moral imperative to act. For if Southern Governors, such as George Wallace of Alabama, had done the right thing and ended segregation, the Federal Government would not have had to step in and curtail the powers of the State Governments to decide their own affairs."