Can Alex Jones Spot a Patsy?

These days, it is remarkably difficult to frame someone for a criminal act and get away with it for any appreciable length of time. Sooner or later, an astute journalist or filmmaker or lovelorn correspondent is going to realize that the wrong person is in prison, and they're going to attempt to do something about it. Thanks to the efforts of groups like the Innocence Project, false convictions in the U.S. are being overturned at record pace. In Canada, vigilant media outlets like the fifth estate have turned the falsely convicted into household names, raising awareness of shoddy investigative techniques and bogus expert testimony. In fact, even if a convict is guilty as all hell, a William F. Buckley might step in and persuade the public - and, more importantly, the parole board - that They Got the Wrong Guy. Patsies are certainly not a thing of the past, but it is now harder than ever to sustain a fraudulent case against a suspect.

How ironic, then, that Alex Jones and company have convinced a huge number of us that we live in the Age of the Patsy. Crazy gunmen are actually mind-controlled assassins, racist lunatic bombers are just drugged-up scapegoats, and homicidal hijackers don't even exist.
I've noticed a very interesting thing about Jones and patsies, though. I've mentioned it several times already (notably here), and recent events have reinforced my suspicions in a powerful way.
Here's the deal: If a suspect is thought to be right-wing, like the Boston bomb suspects, Jones will almost immediately denounce the entire case as a false flag operation engineered by one or more government entities (or, in non-U.S. cases like Norway, "globalists" - a handy umbrella term for anyone who does anything Jones doesn't like). But if the suspect appears to have left-leaning tendencies, like ricin-mailing suspect Paul Curtis, Jones and Infowars will float the official story with few questions asked. This was the case with James Lee, who burst into the offices of the Discovery Channel in 2010 and threatened to kill staff members for the corporation's alleged failure to adequately address climate change and environmental pollution. It was also the case with Arizona gunman Jared Loughner, whom Jones denounced as an "abortion-loving atheist" and Infowars declared as fitting into the "classic satanic/vampire cult wannabe mould" (whatever that is). Jones suggested these men could be under the influence of mind control and psychotropic drugs, but didn't refer to them as patsies or try to convince us they were the victims of government blackmail.

On that note, let's take a closer look at how Jones handled the recent ricin mailings and the Boston bombings.

Boston: Barely half an hour after the first reports of bomb blasts, Jones tweets his suspicion that this was a false flag event. Later, Infowars articles tie events in Boston to foiled terrorist plots in which the FBI was involved, and Jones declares the FBI his #1 suspect. Jones predicts that pro-gun advocates like Oath Keepers will be framed for the attack.
Ricin: Responding to reports that letters thought to contain ricin were intercepted en route to President Obama, a Mississippi judge, and Senator Roger Wicker, a Prison Planet article argues that Wicker, as a Republican supporter of Second Amendment rights, was not the victim of right-wing gun nuts (as some media commentators speculated). The article suggests They will attempt to link the ricin letters to Boston.

Boston: In numerous articles, Infowars casts doubt on what the media has to say about the "patsy" suspects. At one point, they even question whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev actually died or not, pointing to grainy unsourced footage of a naked man being detained by police.

Ricin: On the day of Curtis' arrest, Infowars publishes a single article about the ricin mailing, titled "Ricin Arrest: Suspect Appears to Be a Mentally Unstable Democrat". The article does not contradict or question mainstream media reports, and plays up a vaguely anti-gun comment that Curtis once left on HuffPo. There is no longer any suggestion that the ricin mailings could be part of a false flag operation.

Boston: Infowars publishes photos of two "suspects". Though these two men are not doing anything particularly suspicious in the photos, Jones insists they are either military contractors employed by Craft International or Navy SEALs, and that they are much stronger suspects than the Tsarnaev brothers. Jones continues to bang the drum about these two men despite the fact that he is fully aware of the dangers of fingering innocent people.
Ricin: Not a single alternative suspect is presented.

Boston: Jones theorizes the bombings were just an excuse to give the TSA increased powers and enable gun control.

Ricin: After the arrest of Curtis, no alternative theories are presented.

Boston: Jones gradually adds the CIA and other entities to his list of suspects. He continues to refer to the Tsarnaevs as patsies, but admits they might have been involved in some capacity.
Ricin: Still no alternative suspects. Infowars reposts an extremely brief story about Curtis' release without additional comment.

Paul "Kevin" Curtis looked like a pretty good suspect. An Elvis impersonator with a penchant for conspiracy theories, he supposedly used his own initials and a favourite quote in the ricin letters. Even his friends complained about his erratic and obnoxious behaviour. For the past 12 years, he has been zealously trying to expose an alleged organ-harvesting operation, claiming he was wrongfully fired from a custodial job at North Mississippi Medical Center after he found a severed head and other body parts in a morgue refrigerator. The guy is clearly a few croutons short of a salad, and Alex Jones has no love for the mentally ill.
But Curtis was not the guy. He was a patsy. Someone carefully culled information from his many Facebook posts and other online ramblings in order to incriminate him. Because Curtis had previously sent letters about organ harvesting to Sen. Wicker and several other politicians, the lookalike ricin letters quickly made him the prime suspect. There is one suspected culprit in this frame-up job, but to date there have been no other arrests in the case.
How is it that Alex Jones, with his amazing predictive powers and psychic ability, completely missed this? And just why was the Infowars crew so quick to accept mainstream media reports about Curtis, while simultaneously challenging each and every media report about Boston?
I won't answer that. As they say in the conspiracy world, I'm only asking questions.

Why do mass murder conspiracy theories flourish, and how can I help stop them?

If you're on Facebook, or have conspiranoid coworkers, or live anywhere other than beneath a rock, you've probably heard at least one of the following conspiracy theories about the Aurora and/or Newtown shootings:

•  James Holmes and Adam Lanza were mind controlled assassins, programmed to kill large numbers of people so that Obama/Communists/Rothschilds/whoever can push through restrictive legislation, damage the reputations of certain citizens, declare martial law, psychologically destabilize Americans, make blood sacrifices to the Devil, and/or distract us from "more important" things that are happening. Infowars promoted these theories, here and here and here and here. More recently, a fellow prison detainee claimed Holmes blames his therapist for programming him to be a killer, but there's no way of knowing at this time if Holmes actually said such a thing or not (IMO, it seems unlikely that Holmes would be left alone with another detainee for four hours, as Steven Unruh says). Nonetheless, the story was picked up by Infowars (here) and by The Huffington Post (here). Note that while the tone of the HuffPo article is justifiably skeptical, the Infowars article decries the mainstream media's neglect of this "shocking" story and uncritically takes Unruh's word for everything.
• James Holmes' father, Robert, was scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing on the Libor interest rate scandal at the time of the Aurora massacre. Clearly, the bankers called in New World Order mind controllers to program his son to become a killer so that his invaluable testimony would never be heard. An Infowars forum user promoted this theory here.
• Adam Lanza's father, Peter, was also scheduled to testify on the Libor banking scandal (the same Infowars forum user promoted this theory, here).

The last two theories are quite similar to one that surfaced after nanny Yoselyn Ortega murdered her two charges, the son and daughter of CNBC executive Kevin Krim. Several conspiracy sites, like this one, immediately adopted the theory that someone had programmed or otherwise manipulated Ortega into a double homicide and a suicide attempt because the CNBC website had published a report on a $43 trillion lawsuit that has been filed against "banksters" and a laundry list of financial entities. The theorists noted that the article was removed almost as soon as it appeared, meaning Krim may have recognized his children's murder as a message to continue keeping a lid on the lawsuit. However, this "report" turned out to be a press release from Spire, the law firm behind the lawsuit. Chances are good that it was posted on CNBC by accident, then removed when someone realized it wasn't a legit news story. In all likelihood, because it so incredibly broad and vague, the lawsuit will be tossed out of court. I doubt the banking establishment is at all concerned about it. Furthermore, when Ortega recovered from her self-inflicted wounds and spoke with investigators a week after the murders, she made it clear that her crime was motivated by her resentment over being allegedly treated like a maid by the Krims. This is starkly at odds with one blogger's confident assertion: "That is, a priori, and without any detailed detective work, I feel there is roughly a 9 in 10 chance that Lucia and Leo have been murdered by rogue elements of the United States government."
On closer examination, the shooting theories are equally groundless. Robert Holmes was employed as an anti-fraud specialist for FICO, the credit-scoring company, but he had no connection to the Libor affair. There was no Senate hearing scheduled, anyway.
Adam Lanza's father has no link to the scandal, either. Max Keiser.com and Occupy Corporatism, among other alt media outlets, have been doing their best to debunk this bit of misinfo. They allege that it originated with Sorcha Faal, the same peculiar conspiracy-monger who was behind one of the least credible conspiracy theories about Michael Jackson's death.
No actual evidence has emerged to indicate that either James Holmes or Adam Lanza were in any way influenced, coerced, or brainwashed into committing their crimes.

So misinformation is the backbone of these theories. Another part of the problem is that the average person has little to no knowledge of criminology. That's probably a good thing - knowing how criminals behave isn't exactly a marketable skill. But when it comes to creating conspiracy theories, it's going to seriously hamper your ability to put together a coherent and plausible narrative. One thing I hear a lot in connection to mass murder is that the killer looked blank, glassy-eyed, or robotic. This is presented as proof that the killer was under some form of mind control. In reality, if you talked to and/or observed people with Intermittent Rage Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder (to give just two examples), you would quickly learn that these people can and do appear poker-faced when carrying out crimes that would turn other people's stomachs. The survivors of their crimes can tell you this. A man with Intermittent Rage Disorder once told me he feels paradoxically calm and focused during his rages.
If you review mass murders of the past, you'll find that the killers' motivations were generally not political in nature (Anders Breivik would be a notable exception). For them, it was personal. They were, for the most part, emotionally or mentally disturbed individuals who killed in retaliation for real or perceived slights. Some did it for pure enjoyment (I believe Eric Harris falls into this category; Dylan Klebold went along for the ride, and seemingly remained in denial right up to the time of his death).

So how can you help prevent the spread of shoddy, factually-challenged conspiracy theories? Before turning an online conspiracy theory into copypasta, do yourself the following favours:

1.  Take 5 minutes out of your day to hit the search engines of your choice and make sure the information is accurate (odds are, it isn't, and you've just saved yourself some time and energy). Remember that anyone can be wrong, so information isn't necessarily reliable just because it has been repeated by a certain source.
2. Apply common sense to the situation. For instance, if Adam Lanza is a Manchurian Candidate, who programmed him? He was homeschooled, so it couldn't be those godless public school Commie teachers. He didn't have a job, so it couldn't be his boss. His mom wasn't exactly up to New World Order mind controller standards. Besides, would some shadowy government entity spend months or years grooming an unstable and unreliable young man to become an assassin, when mercenaries and unscrupulous criminals and CIA agents can be hired on the cheap to accomplish the same task more efficiently?
3. Apply Occam's Razor for good measure. Is it more likely that a sadistic or deranged person decided to commit a crime, or is it more likely that a government-funded Svengali flawlessly conditioned him to commit a crime? If a liquor store is robbed, do you automatically assume that a mind-controlled patsy did it, or do you assume that some cash-hungry creep did it?

The Blame Game: Screw It

18 children under the age of 11 have been killed by a 20-year-old gunman, and I am in no mood for this Manchurian Candidate nonsense today. I've had quite enough of the Infowars Blame Game of offloading blame for atrocities onto anyone but the perpetrators. Every time someone murders schoolchildren or innocent bystanders because he's suffering from a severe mental illness, is a sociopath, or wants to get even with the powers that be, Jones and Company take a cursory look at the initial reports, draw a sweeping conclusion from the limited facts available, and stick to it no matter what subsequently emerges. Did a racist kill a museum worker because he couldn't stand his tax dollars going toward Holocaust education? Well, no, he was actually blackmailed by some shadowy government entity - even though there is zero evidence for that. Did a Norwegian douchebag open fire on a kids' camp because he didn't like the political affiliation of the organizers? Nope, he's just a patsy in a New World Order scheme to suppress Norway's version of libertarians - even though he went into great detail about his motives in court.
Have you ever been right about this stuff, Infowars? If you're such master profilers, maybe you should tackle some cold cases. The Lindbergh baby? Mind-controlled patsies took him. The Black Dahlia? Probably a "Valkyrie-style takeover drill".

As for the Second Ammendment concerns that Infowars places above everything else in the latest school shooting (even the lives lost), and their complaints about celebrities calling for gun control, a Facebook friend expressed it best:

When someone reacts to this shooting by talking about how to prevent future events like it, they're "politicizing tragedy." What would you call it when someone reacts by screaming about how disgusted they are that the government may take steps to limit their capacity to shoot people? (Even though it probably won't.)

Is anyone really impressed by Infowars' lazy, gun-jumping b.s.? Does a hastily-typed report by Paul Joseph Watson actually convince you that the latest crazy asshole must be a New World Order zombie, even though everything in it has been culled from mainstream media reports that are supposedly far less reliable than Infowars? Well, then, you just might be living in a sick, dismal fantasy world. And maybe you should stay there. I really don't care today.
Rather than struggling to distort this tragedy to fit my political ends, I'm going to see it for what it is (a terrible crime against children) and mourn for the many families who have been devastated by it.

The Self-Made Manchurian Candidate

Ted Kaczynski keeps coming up in the context of the Aurora conspiracy. In Alex Jonestown, most mass murderers are just mind-controlled patsies, and Kaszinski fits neatly into that category because he might have been involved in MK-ULTRA LSD experiments while a student at Harvard.

Do yourself a favour. Look at the effects and side effects of LSD. Note how long they last. Ask yourself if using LSD in the very early '60s would cause you to become a mad bomber in the late '70s.

Now look at Trazodone We don't know with certainty that Ted took LSD, but we do know he took Trazodone on a pretty regular basis. Look at the effects and side effects of that drug.

The Blame Game: Hollywood Edition

 Jones is heavily into "predictive programming" analysis these days, looking for clues to the globalist agenda in cartoons, magazines, and especially Hollywood movies. Last month, he pointed to an illustration in a 1994 issue of Vice, featuring Beavis and Butthead as Al Qaeda terrorists circling the Twin Towers in little airplanes, as a classic example of "predictive programming". That's when bad guys tell you exactly what they're going to do to you before they do it because their ancient, heathen math religion demands a willing victim (you know, like Cabin in the Woods). The problem with this brilliant theory is, the issue was actually a mock-up of a 1994 magazine to commemorate Vice's 15th anniversary - written, illustrated, and printed in 2009. Vice explained this before Jones went on the air with his "Beavis and Butthead predicted 9/11" rant, so a 30-second 'Net search would have saved him the trouble.

Most of the time, Jones doesn't actually watch the movies before he puts out a video dissecting the globalist symbolism and programming in them. Instead, he claims to have a "leaked" copy of the script or an "early draft" of the script, and he bases all his conclusions on that. Which is a terrible idea, considering that even when Jones actually goes to a movie and watches it from beginning to end, he doesn't understand what he's watching and gets everything horribly wrong. Watch his factually challenged Watchmen review or his unintentionally hilarious Squidbillies analysis or his off-topic rant about GMO corn in his review of The Road to see what I mean. Or just look around you and see if you can spot the signs of the epic race war that was supposed to be unleashed by the action-comedy Machete.
I was already working on a post about his absurd analysis of Prometheus when this Dark Knight Rises thing came up. Last night, my Significant Other played Jones's analysis of the film (below) twice (Jones claims to have a leaked copy of the script), then we discussed how alarmist and off-base it was, and how Jones (particularly in some of his gun ads) tries to inspire fear and anger in his audiences. I also noticed that Jones tends to identify with the angriest, least rational, most unpredictably violent characters in films (The Joker as played by Heath Ledger, Rorschach in Watchmen).





As soon as I woke up and heard that people in Aurora, Colorado had been shot at a midnight screening of Dark Knight Rises, I thought, "Oh, great. An Alex Jones fan has snapped."
Jones is already bitching about the same thing, saying the media is trying to blame him for the shooting.
That is absolutely not the case. None of the mainstream outlets have been able to find out anything about the gunman's personal tastes - his apartment is reportedly booby-trapped with suspicious-looking bottles of fluid and/or possible explosive devices - so his taste in radio broadcasters is still very much unknown. Jones has not been mentioned in any mainstream news story.
Regardless of what they find in that apartment, though, it's obvious that James Eaton Holmes could not have been inspired solely by Jones's "analysis" of The Dark Knight Rises. He already had a flak vest and gas canisters or smokebombs and a little arsenal at his disposal by that time. Also - and I don't mean to be unkind - I don't think aspiring neuroscientists are among Jones's hardcore fans. Until last month, Holmes was studying neuroscience at the University of Colorado (he already has a degree from the University of California Riverside).

No one knows Holmes's motives yet, except for Alex Jones. He has it all figured out. And so do you, if you're a regular listener. You already know what he's going to say. You already know how to play the Blame Game. But for those who may have missed it, here's a review of what Jones has had to say about the other crazed gunmen and mass murderers of recent years, culled from earlier posts on this blog. 

- Timothy McVeigh made it crystal clear that he planned the Oklahoma City Bombing partly in retaliation for the Waco massacre. But in Jonestown, he's just an FBI patsy whose handlers probably told him he was fighting white supremacists, and he confessed in graphic detail on multiple occasions only because he was drugged by the CIA.

- For over 20 years, elderly racist James Von Brunn made it extremely clear that he loathed non-whites and non-Christians. But when Von Brunn walked into the D.C. Holocaust Museum in 2009 and opened fire on the security guards, Alex Jones declared  the shooting was probably engineered jointly by the government (as part of what he called a "Valkyrie takeover drill") and the Anti-Defamation League. Von Brunn was possibly threatened into participating. He has not provided any evidence to back up these theories.

- When Joseph Stack intentionally crashed an airplane into an Austin office tower in February 2010, he left behind a vitriolic letter blaming the IRS for all his troubles. Jones talked about the attack on-air for about 3 hours before suddenly deciding he had predicted the attack with his earlier rants about the Great Tea Partier Frameup of 2010 that never actually happened. Stack, too, was not what he seemed (a tax deadbeat with anger issues), but a government patsy who was somehow manipulated into plowing a plane into a building.

- When children shoot up their schools, it's not because they're mentally ill or because they're psychotic little assholes, even if the videos and writings they leave behind point clearly in one of those directions. It's because of psych meds they might not even be taking.
Jones once stated, "We didn't have these school shootings until 1988, when Prozac came out." At one point, Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars actually tried to pin Mark Chapman's murder of John Lennon on Prozac...which wasn't even available until two years after Lennon's death.
This SSRI theory ignores the fact that many of the worst school massacres, including the worst one in American history, occurred long before these drugs were on the market. For instance, a California vice principal killed five of his colleagues and injured a sixth in 1940.

- Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA/military plant who didn't shoot at anyone. He was forced to pose as a leftist by his handlers. Even as a teenager and even when no one was looking, I guess.

- January 9, 2011: Jones explained that Jared Loughner is probably a government mind-controlled assassin and an abortion-loving atheist Commie. Weirdly, he's also linked to white supremacy and was a fan of Jones's frequent guest David Icke, who teaches us that the elites are lizard hybrids rather than people, but that's not very important.
Jones admitted there wasn't a lot of evidence (read: any evidence) that Loughner is a Manchurian Candidate, but like all other Candidates, he was preoccupied with mind control. So are many mentally ill people, but never mind that. Federal zombie assassins are way more interesting.

- When James Lee entered Discovery Channel headquarters and threatened to shoot employees for not doing enough to save the planet, leaving behind a radical environmentalist screed, Alex Jones accepted the media's explanation at face value. So you see, when a right-wing extremist shoots people, he's only doing it on behalf of the government (or because he has been drugged and/or threatened by the government). His stated motives are not the real motives, and his intended goal is not his intended goal. But if a left-wing extremist shoots people, he really is doing exactly what he says he's doing.

- After Anders Breivik opened fire on schoolchildren and bombed a building in Norway last year, Jones suddenly realized that Infowars predicted the Norway attacks the day before they happened. He explained it all in these video messages.
Never mind that Infowars started out speculating that Middle Eastern terrorists could be responsible for the Norway attacks, or that within hours of the attacks, Kurt Nimmo concluded the whole thing was really a false flag NWO attack designed to crush the growing populist movement in Norway. Then Infowars decried the mainstream media's scapegoating of Middle Eastern terrorists. Pot, meet kettle.
Throughout all this nonsense, Infowars didn't say anything about Jones predicting the attacks. So did he actually call it, just like he "predicted" the Austin plane crash? No. What Jones griped about the day before the Norway attacks was the use of white terror suspects in DHS terrorism-awareness videos. These are the same hokey PSA videos I discussed earlier in the year. In his opinion, they're a huge part of the NWO effort to brand white populists like himself as The New Threat to Mankind. In my opinion, they're generic PSAs. The reason the vids don't feature Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously is because the DHS didn't want to come off as a bunch of racists.

The "patsy" Breivik confessed to his crimes and the motivations for them in such excruciating detail and with such obvious enthusiasm that the court actually ordered him to stop, realizing he was using his trial as a soapbox for a racist, pathologically anti-Communist credo. What an awful patsy. Aren't patsies supposed to sit down and shut up? And what awful globalist plotters - if they wanted Breivik's "false flag" crimes to be seen as a threat to society, then why didn't they let him natter on and on in court?

And now we have Holmes, another Manchurian Candidate (he was in a neuroscience program - isn't that enough evidence?). He was probably a Democrat. He was probably given powerful drugs, then taken to a private screening of the new Batman movie so that he would be programmed to "channel" the villain, Bane. That's the whole point of Hollywood comic book movies: Department of Defense programming.
Public officials are now trying to merge reality with Hollywood fiction by referring to Holmes as The Joker, sucking us all into the illusion that we live in Gotham with superheroes and supervillains. Never mind that it was Holmes himself who allegedly dyed his hair orange and told police, "I'm the Joker." Never mind that Jones himself once went on a Joker binge, painting his face to deliver weird rants and mass-producing Obama-as-Joker T-shirts and posters.
The point, as always, is gun control (the UN Arms Trade treaty Obama is set to sign) and social conditioning psy-ops (encouraging some of us to be violent and the rest of us to be fearful and subservient to authority). Like I said, Jones has it all figured out. He's practically psychic.