Ron Paul supporters often tell me it simply doesn't matter that for two decades, Ron Paul's newsletters cranked out bizarre and alarmist stories about race wars, blacks taking over white neighbourhoods with their drugs and their random violence, the "gay agenda", and the political liability that blacks have become.* "He's not really racist," they tell me. "He didn't even know those articles were being written." They say that anyone who still makes an issue of it should be ashamed, because there is no issue and there never really was. Paul apologized and took some of the blame, so now we should just erase it from our minds.
To this day, we don't know who wrote the racist articles published in Ron Paul's newsletters, because no one has taken credit/blame for them, and Ron Paul apparently doesn't know who it was (Lew Rockwell is the prime suspect, though). That in itself is a problem, because a man who wants to run an entire country should have the organizational skills to know what's being published under his name. If I had a newsletter going out to people all over the country, I wouldn't let one stamp touch them until I at had least skimmed the latest issue. I realize Dr. Paul was a busy dude in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there's really no excuse for allowing your staff to publish bizarre racist screeds under your name with your consent. Even to this day, Paul claims he doesn't know who was writing what. Doesn't that seem negligent at best, and dishonest at worst? I don't blame Ron Paul for the screwy stuff that gets posted to the Daily Paul forums, because cleaning those up would be like clearing the Aegean stables. I don't fault him for the fact that the American Free Press, a rag established by white supremacists, prints his column; AFP pays him for syndication, and like most columnists who are in syndication, he doesn't pick and choose the publications in which his work appears. But I do blame him for failing to monitor his newsletter more closely. All of this has to make you wonder how many other bucks Paul has passed.
Look at this way: If I welcomed a group of other bloggers to contribute to Leaving Alex Jonestown, and they began posting stuff like "Alex Jones Can Suck My Big Hairy Balls Becuz He Is a Faggot" (that's an actual YouTube comment, BTW), wouldn't you be offended and annoyed with me? I think you'd have every right to be. Clearly, I was shirking my responsibilities and allowing the lunatics to run the asylum.
I'm approaching this from the best-case scenario angle, the one that says Ron Paul simply had some racist associates and let them have too much control over his publications. The worst-case scenario is, well, worse. In that one, Ron Paul did write some or all of the content for some reason (to appeal to a certain demographic, or to convince constituents that he would keep them safe from the invading non-white hordes, or whatever), then lied about it. I would prefer not to think that of Paul. He doesn't seem like a racist. A touch homophobic, certainly, but not the kind of guy who's going to make fun of Kwanzaa or use the phrase "nappy-haired hos" in casual conversation. Let's face it, though: If we don't know who wrote the stuff, that means we don't know who wrote the stuff. Nothing has been debunked in the newsletter affair.
* There's really no dispute that some of the newsletter content was racist and disparaging of minorities. An unidentified author referred to Martin Luther King Jr. day as "Hate Whitey Day". Another wrote, "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." That's fine for a southern newsletter put out by a "League for Racial Purity", but it's not acceptable for a U.S. president. Check out loads more of the newsletter content at Et tu, Mr. Destructo?.
On Halloween, Alex Jones conducted a Skype interview with Fritz Springmeier, who was released from prison in March. You can watch the full interview on Infowars, but here's the first part:
I have written about Fritz Springmeier many times in passing. He has appeared at least once on this blog ("Al Gore and the Suitcase of Blood"), several times on Swallowing the Camel, and quite a few times on blogs dealing with "Satanic panic".
It would be exhausting and rather pointless to detail his entire career here, but if you're unfamiliar with Springmeier, here are some details you may want to know:
Born in 1955, he used the name Victor Earl Schoof until legally changing it to Fritz Springmeier in 1987.
He says he attended West Point, but did not.
He professes to be a very religious man, and once ran a sort of Christian lay ministry (he is not an ordained minister, and does not have any theological training).
In 1997 he allegedly circulated a strange "affidavit", accusing several other Christian ministers, including Alex Jones's mentor Texe Marrs, or trying to sabotage this ministry. "Several people have told me my ex-wife is controlled by demons and given her life to Satan," he wrote of his second wife, Gail.
To his mind, every religious tradition outside of the Judeo-Christian is basically Satanism. This includes ancient Egyptian beliefs, Theosophy, and any form of occultism. Oh, and Jehovah's Witnesses. And the Catholic Church. In a 1996 Prophecy Club lecture, Springmeier said every human on Earth is tracked from birth to death by Jesuit priests.
His conspiracy writing and lectures have been a huge influence on David Icke. Much of Springmeier's misinfo has made it into Icke's books. For example, the Belgian castle called Chateau Amerois is referred to by both Springmeier and Icke as the "Mothers of Darkness" castle, in which the elite hold ghastly Satanic rituals and slaughter children.
In the early '90s, he became deeply interested in the subject of government mind control programs, and trained himself to be a deprogrammer of women who allegedly survived "Project Monarch", a supposed offshoot of MK-ULTRA*. He ended up leaving his second wife and young son for one of these women, Cisco Wheeler. Together they authored books and gave lectures on Illuminati mind control techniques. Their best-known work is the massive book The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Mind Controlled Slave.
Cisco Wheeler, like all alleged Monarch victims, was deliberately programmed to have multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder). One of her alter personalities was a cat.
Springmeier's take on history is, um, creative. In the Prophecy Club lecture cited above, he declared that Hitler was descended from the Rothschilds. You'll see more of his unique interpretations of history later in this post.
He really, and I mean really, hates The Wizard of Oz. He's convinced it's a Satanic parable used in the mind control programming and ritual torture of young children. He thinks the same of every film, book, and TV show that appears to reference Oz in any way (for instance, the movie K-Pax).
In his book Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Springmeier attempted to identify the 13 families that have controlled the world for centuries. His M.O. was to tick off lists of prominent people with the same last name, without bothering to ascertain if they were actually related to one another, then link them to the Illuminati by the most tenuous connections. For example, reporter Robert Collins was implicated simply because he had the surname Collins and because the Illuminati "control the press" (Springmeier provided no evidence that the Illuminati does, in fact, control the press). Likewise, he tied serial killer Ted Bundy to the Bundy/McBundy families, and explained that his sadistic sociopathic condition is quite typical of Illuminati members, even though Bundy's name came from a working class stepfather.
In the '80s, he vociferously defended "former Illuminati member" John Todd long after Todd's stories were shown to be fraudulent. The late Mr. Todd was a "Christian" con artist posing as a former Satanist. He was also a convicted rapist. Though he had a long history of complaints against him for propositioning teenage girls, and faced related criminal charges several times, Springmeier insisted that Todd's rape conviction was a frame-up by (who else?) the Illuminati. At one point, he even claimed that Todd had been abducted from prison and murdered by Illuminati agents in 1994. This was not true. Todd was released from prison in 2004, was remanded into custody as a dangerous sex offender, and died a natural death three years later. Now, Springmeier uses the same cry of frame-up in reference to his own criminal activities.
In their book Deeper Insights Into the Illuminati Formula, Springmeier and Wheeler state that the Illuminati has been creating "synthetic humans" (made partly from cows) since the 1970s.
In 2001, he and his third wife, Patricia, were arrested for having a marijuana grow op in conjunction with a white supremacist, Forrest E. Bateman, Sr. Bateman was convicted in 1989 of racially intimidating a high school student in Forest Grove, Oregon, and three years later he appeared on the state police's Ten Most Wanted list for firearm offenses and assault connected to skinhead activities. And now we get to the heart of the matter...
Kooky as he was, and annoying as his continuous stream of nonsense could be, I had no reason to suspect that Springmeier was in any way a violent man. So I was shocked in 2002, when Springmeier was indicted on charges of planting a bomb in an adult video store and robbing a bank in Damascus, Oregon, years earlier.
Here's what happened: On the afternoon of October 8, 1997, a propane bomb exploded in the Fantasy Adult Video Store in Damascus. No one was injured.
Roughly ten minutes later and six miles away, a man in camo fatigues, later identified as Forrest Bateman, Sr., walked into the Damascus branch of Key Bank of Oregon and demanded cash from a teller, firing his assault rifle at the ceiling to intimidate bank employees and patrons into complying with his demands. He exited the bank with a mere $6000.
The bombing and robbery went unsolved until 2001, when police discovered the pot operation Springmeier, his wife, and some friends were running. Springmeier and Bateman were arrested after deputies of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office seized fifty marijuana plants, bomb-making materials and illegal weapons**, and Army of God literature from Bateman’s home in Sandy, Oregon, in February. Anthony Huntington (Bateman's housemate), Patricia Springmeier, and a woman named Jennifer Williams were also arrested. Bateman already had outstanding warrants against him for of assault and illegal possession of an assault rifle. The FBI was brought into the case because of the weapons and Army of God literature, which indicated possible terrorist activities.
Anthony Huntington turned out to be the weakest link in the robbery chain. Faced with serious prison time for weapons and drug charges, he confessed his own role in planning the 1997 bombing and bank robbery, and gave up the names of his co-conspirators, including Springmeier and Bateman (most reports hint there was at least one other man involved, but no other co-conspirators are named). The drug and weapons charges were dropped and replaced with charges related to the bombing and robbery.
Batemen pled guilty and was sentenced to 9 years in prison. Springmeier pled not guilty, was convicted, and received the same sentence as Bateman. Huntington, for his testimony against Bateman and Springmeier, received a reduced sentence for his role in the bombing and robbery. He was released in 2005. It should be noted that the longest prison term was served not by Springmeier, but by Bateman. Bateman was released from prison in September, a full seven months after Springmeier.
In my opinion, these three guys got off easy: Five and nine years are ridiculously short sentences for two violent crimes that could easily have resulted in fatalities.
Now here's where the "political prisoner" part comes into play. Springmeier claims total innocence in this affair. His story is that he knew Huntington only from Bible study. He knew nothing about the bombing, he knew nothing about the robbery, and the whole thing was a frame-up. He has even said he has an alibi: He was working at a print shop in Eagle Creek, a town ten miles from Damascus, exactly when the robbery occurred. But his boss refused to confirm this, he says, because Springmeier had once offended him by criticizing Billy Graham.
According to Fritz, he was framed for a variety of reasons: He helped people leave the Illuminati, he published his mind control research, he exposed an "entire community" of Illuminati members in Bend, Oregon (forcing them to sell their homes and move elsewhere). He insists there was no evidence against him (both he and Jones betray a total lack of understanding of just what circumstantial evidence is, and how powerful it can be when used properly). He claims the three witnesses who testified against him at trial were bribed, though he presents no evidence of this. Not even circumstantial evidence.
Hard information about the case is scanty. Most of the original news articles have been taken down, and Internet searches just bring up the same small amount of info provided by Springmeier's supporters (you'll find dozens of re-posts of Henry Makow's essay "How Fritz Springmeier Was Framed", which will not tell you how Fritz Springmeier was framed; it's simply more of Makow's usual "the Illuminati did everything and that's the end of it" b.s.).
It is not known to me precisely why Springmeier was growing pot, nor why he decided to take part in a bank robbery. The authorities seem to think he and his buddies were "fundraising" for even more sinister activities, such as bombing abortion clinics or federal buildings. It's entirely possible, however, that Springmeier just wanted some cash.
In spite of his association with the racist Bateman, I have found no evidence that Springmeier is directly involved with organized racist or racial separatist groups. His wife maintains that he is not a racist. He does have some peculiar ideas about Nazis and Jews, though. In Deeper Insights Into the Illuminati Formula, he and Wheeler contend that the Nazi concentration camps were established not because the Nazis wanted to confine and exterminate citizens they deemed non-Aryan, but simply to perform mind control experiments on children. The racial supremacy thing was just a "cover". And he espouses conspiracy theories that Jewish people essentially control the world. In Bloodlines of the Illuminati, he and Wheeler wrote, "Since the core of the conspiracy of power is Jewish, the attitude of those allied with it hinges on their attitude toward the Jewish people." They also stated that Oliver Cromwell was "financed by Jews, and helped the Jews gain power in England." It has been widely reported that Springmeier penned literature for the Christian Patriot Organization, an allegedly white supremacist group that operated an illegal warehouse bank in Oregon. I have found no evidence of this.
Is it possible that Springmeier was framed? Sure. Not likely, but certainly possible. Given the dearth of reliable, readily available info on the case, it's difficult to discern exactly what happened here. To reach an opinion on the case, you have to rely heavily on hearsay and on Fritz's word.
I choose not to believe Springmeier because he is not credible. He already had a criminal record (for parental abduction), and was engaged in drug-related activity, before the bank robbery charges were filed. He hung around with a skinhead bank robber, which is creepy any way you look at it. He believes - or wants us to believe - that fake Illuminati cowpeople walk among us, and that Auschwitz was more a science lab than a death camp. There's just no reason to take his his word for anything. Springmeier is one odd, shady dude.
Alex Jones has a history of supporting incarcerated people who were definitely not persecuted, yet insist they were. Remember Ed and Elaine Brown, the elderly New Hampshire couple who decided that paying income tax is for fools, and were duly convicted (after an armed stand-off) of not paying their taxes? They cried foul from prison, and Alex Jones put them on the air to share their story with the world. What he did not share with the world were the couple's various allegations that Freemasons, Zionists, Illuminati members, and Jesuits had framed them. That would have seemed silly to most of his listeners, because it's fairly obvious that Freemasons and priests don't give a flying crap about a couple of goofy senior citizens in rural New England who don't feel like paying their taxes.
The same goes for Springmeier, of course. The Powers That Be aren't particularly interested in persecuting small-town Oregonians who publish underground books full of weird mind control instructions, quirky religious beliefs, and warnings about synthetic cowpeople. If they did, Alex Jones wouldn't have many guests left.
I know I'll be getting a shitstorm of emails about this, along the lines of "You don't know if Fritz is innocent or not!". Yeah, well, Jones doesn't know either. In the opening of the video, he makes it clear that he based his opinion of Springmeier's sincerity on vibes: "I didn't get any bad vibes from him, and I know that that's always the real signal." Somehow, I don't think that would stand up in court. Also, Jones has been selling Bloodlines of the Illuminati, and it would certainly not be to his benefit to admit that he's been hawking the wares of a convicted bomber and bank robber, would it?
* H.P. Albarelli, Jr., spent nearly two decades researching the CIA and its mind control programs. He uncovered startling new evidence, but he found no evidence of Monarch, nor any comparable program. However, he did locate a man who admitted "the Monarch Project" was something he invented. ** According to one report:a machine gun, a grenade launcher, an assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, 3000 rounds of ammunition, ammonium nitrate, homemade C4 explosives, six homemade grenades, dynamite blasting caps, primers, fuses, black powder, and 200 timing devices, as well as a bizarre "suit of armor" made out of ceramic bearing an Army of God patch
It's not entirely Anders Breivik's fault that he slaughtered dozens of innocent people. We should also blame the New World Order, Muslims, liberals, Jews, people who don't like Jews, and maybe Hitler.
As Alex Jones showed us, the Powers That Be staged a false-flag terror attack in Norway expressly to give themselves an excuse to squash all patriots who oppose big government and "bankster" fraud. This isn't a Norwegian thing; it's a globalist elite thing. So we must remember that domestic terrorism is not the real threat, here.
Pat Buchanan, who has been a guest on The Alex Jones Show several times, may not agree with the first part of that statement, but he's totally on board with the end of it: The media is using the massacre to undermine right-wing populist movements throughout the world. Domestic terrorism isn't the real problem.
Muslims are. Specifically, Muslims immigrating into countries like Norway. In a column at World Net Daily He writes:
"... awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists."
In conclusion:
"As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."
Meanwhile, Pamela Geller (a leading opponent of the "Ground Zero Mosque") informs us that while, yes, Breivik's behaviour was monstrous, the Liberal-sponsored youth camp he targeted was an "indoctrination camp run by Norway’s ruling Labor Party for up-and-coming children of the ruling elite". The same sentiment was expressed by Alex Jones's ideological twin, Glenn Beck, on his radio show. As reported by The Telegraph: "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing." He made a point of adding that a Republican youth camp would also be disturbing. I guess his fact-checker took the year day off, and couldn't tell him about this. It's a little creepy, sure, but "Hitler youth"?
Frequent Jones guest Wayne Madsen has a different take: Because Breivik was reportedly a fan of Pamela Geller's blog, this all but proves he was part of an Israeli Mossad operation to take over... well, pretty much everything. He writes, "Because our police forces in America, New Zealand, Norway, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia and elsewhere are infiltrated with Mossad sayanim, katsas, and jumper katsas, we must take it upon ourselves to expose these agents, publicize their names, turn the disinfectant of sunshine on their subterranean operations, and generally, make life miserable for them."
So it's been 30 days since the release of Machete, and though border violence has not abated, there seems to be no escalation in Mexican-on-American violence thanks to the movie. I saw it, and it's the usual zany, over-the-top Rodriguez fare. There's a political undertone, but it's hard to take seriously with lines like, "The bullet in his head was stopped by another bullet!". Anyone who takes Machete as a call to arms is seriously disturbed, and could just as easily be swayed by secret government messages in the Sunday comics or something.
I can recall many similar manufactured controversies. Years ago, Christians fretted that The Bridges of Madison County could give the green light for housewives to screw every traveling salesmen they met. Didn't happen. Then they worried that their kids might hook up with vagrant artists on cruise ships, because of Titanic. This probably did happen, but who cares? At least they didn't get tanked and fall off the damn boat like that one moron did on his honeymoon. More recently, there have been concerns that Avatar will usher in some kind of global eco-religion, though I really can't picture millions of people modeling themselves after Ferngully Smurfs. In New Zealand, Reservoir Dogs came under heavy fire after a policeman was tortured and his house burned by a "Satanist". Turned out the guy did it himself, partly to get out of his marriage and partly for the insurance money. The only movies that did seem to influence some already unbalanced people are Natural Born Killers and River's Edge (allegedly a favourite of the kids who murdered Elyse Pahler, though Slayer got the blame). Both of these films are heavily satirical, but not as zany as Machete. Hence, a few idiotic kids actually took them at face value. But we can't seriously argue that controversial films should be shelved to prevent a handful of dolts from being influenced by them. If we banned every film that could concievably encourage bad behaviour, we'd be left with very few. Maybe The Sound of Music, movies about talking animals, and some PG comedies would squeak by. That's not the kind of world I want to live in.
Lately, many people have been spreading videos, quotes, and articles featuring David Duke via email, Facebook, blogs, etc. This is a tangential issue, because it's not something Alex Jones is doing himself. It's something that has become mysteriously popular among certain fans of Jones, particularly Truthers and Canadian "Freemen". I have to say something about it because I hate racism more than just about anything else on this planet, and I realize that (strange as this may seem to Americans), a lot of Canadians seem to be unaware of David Duke's history and motives. They like what he has to say about the Israel-Palestine issue, or Zionism, or what-have-you, so they think it's perfectly acceptable to share his "work" for the enlightenment of others.
Here's the deal. I've watched these videos and read these articles, and I can tell you in perfect confidence that everything David Duke has to say about Israel and Palestine has already been said elsewhere, by far more credible (and far less racist) people like Gwynn Dyer, Robert Fisk, and Norman Finkelstein - to name just a few. Duke is not doing original research. I doubt he's even been to Israel or Palestine, as there would be no impetus for a Christian white racial supremacist to hang out with Jews and Muslims (unless it's at a Holocaust denial conference or a PR event). I believe that Duke's recent moral support of Muslims is a ploy; he doesn't actually care about their rights and issues, but it benifits him to align himself with them in the short term, to promote his anti-Semitism. So by using Duke's words, his videos, his image to spread a certain message, rather than going to the source material and putting together your own presentations on the conflict, you look like a total asshole. I guarantee that anyone who knows you're disseminating David Duke literature and vids will look askance at you for the rest of your life, wondering if you're secretly a racial supremacist. It will damage your credibility and reputation beyond measure, no matter how many times you say something like, "I don't like David Duke, I just liked what he had to say in this clip." The attitude seems to be that it's OK to learn from and collaborate with racial supremacists as long as they're not being overtly racist. It's the same attitude I saw among Truthers who worked openly with Holocaust deniers, arguing that if you're united on one issue, it doesn't matter what else you believe. Maybe that's true, but look how much damage was done to the Truth movement by its affiliation with anti-Semites. The bottom line is that by failing to challenge racist disinfo and supremacist propaganda when you're directly faced with it, you are basically aiding and abetting it. You are giving your tacit approval to it. And if you are helping racists spread their message by sharing their videos and literature - for whatever reason - you are actually participating in it.
With the current attitude, it shouldn't be a surprise that white supremacists and white separatists have been making some major headway lately. The separatist movement has its own syndicated radio show, Political Cesspool (on which perennial Jones favourite Paul Craig Roberts has been a guest). And now David Duke, of all people, has somehow managed to dupe certain members of the public - once again - into believing that he has changed and that it's time to stop mentioning his "past" as a Klan leader and racist. If you have fallen for this, I strongly urge you to review even the most basic information about Duke, even just his Wikipedia entry. He does, beyond any shadow of any doubt, believe that the Christian white man is morally, spiritually, physically, and mentally superior to any other race on earth, and that he has a God-given mandate to spread this message to as many people as he can. This is not past tense. David Duke is not appearing on TV and giving radio interviews to offer you unbiased, helpful information about Israel and Palestine; he is using public forums to subtly denigrate non-Christian and/or non-white people so that you will begin to think of yourself as superior to them and jump all the way onto his bandwagon. He is a propagandist. He is a popularizer. He is a recruiter. If you're comfortable with this, go ahead and share his information with everyone you know. If you're not, take a stand. Stop being a vector of thinly veiled racist propaganda.
So Jones and pretty much every conservative broadcaster and journalist in America has been freaking out over the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film Machete. They're insisting it's basically a green light for Mexicans to become violent toward Americans, sanctioned and funded by the state of Texas. The kerfuffle began on the sinister occult holiday Cinco de Mayo, when Rodriguez released a joke trailer for the movie (which you can watch on YouTube, if you don't mind some naughty language and violence) that gave the impression it was all about a campaign of violent retribution against anti-immigration officials. It opens with actor Danny Trebejo delivering a message directly to Arizona, days after the infamous "Papers Please" anti-immigration law was passed. Though Rodriguez quickly assured everyone that violence against Americans isn't really the gist of the movie (which doesn't have an official trailer yet), Jones and company aren't buying it. Jones claims he received phone calls from people who had worked on the film, expressing their opinion that the film really does encourage racial division and could lead to a backlash against Hispanics. He acquired a copy of the script and found that the movie is all about a race war between disgruntled immigrant labourers and white Americans, particularly Minutemen, with many violent confrontation scenes.
Jones' primary beef is that Machete might receive funding from the Texas Film Commission, meaning Texas taxpayers could end up footing the bill for a movie they consider pro-immigration and/or racist. Also, this funding is made possible by Governor Rick Perry - a man Jones loathes. What Jones didn't mention until yesterday is that the Texas Film Commission doesn't directly finance movie production. It just provides 5-15% tax breaks to selected projects, to encourage filming in the state. Film projects are very lucrative for any state. Though an article at Infowars implied the funding is already in the bag, a Film Commission spokesperson says it isn't. No money has been released to Troublemaker Studios; Rodriguez's application is still pending.
Jones' second-biggest complaint is that if the movie was about white people declaring war on Mexicans, it would never receive government funding. Ignore, please, the umpteen major Hollywood films that have portrayed Hispanics as career criminals, drug pushers, gangsters, or lowlifes. Aside from J-Lo flicks and Rodriguez's movies, it's damn near impossible to find mainstream films that portray Hispanics in a favourable light - and you can't tell me that not one of these films received some government funding. He's also annoyed that the Texas Film Commission "refused funding" for a big-budget movie about the Waco tragedy. What actually happened is that when commission director Bob Hudgins expressed concerns about the script, the production company decided to withdraw its application. No one has complained about the Texas Film Commission's support of the Coen brothers' remake of the vigilante cowboy flick True Grit.
"In hindsight, Robert Rodriguez probably oughta thank me for giving this film so much hype, it's been in hundreds of newspapers."
(Alex Jones, May 26th News Alert)
So what is Machete about, anyway? The eponymous character is Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo), who most parents with teens will recognize as the crazy inventor Uncle Machete from the Spy Kids films. In the first film, he and Gregorio (Antonio Banderas) patch up their relationship after Machete helps his niece and nephew defeat an army of kid-bots. Believe me, folks, I know way more about this movie than I want to.
Rodriguez built the Machete character around Trejo back in the early '90s, envisioning him as the Hispanic counterpart to Charles Bronson - famous for a string of vigilante movies.
Machete's next appearance was in one of the fake trailers attached to the 2007 Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, alongside other imaginary gems like Hobo With a Shotgun and Don't (which I found hilarious). Rodriguez announced at that time that Machete would be getting his own movie. It's interesting to compare the faux Grindhouse trailer with the Machete joke trailer. It's even more interesting to study the public's reactions to the two trailers. The Grindhouse trailer, being for a non-existent movie, received no negative attention whatsoever. Not one person griped that Rodriguez was encouraging Hispanics to go out and chop up white folks. No one accused him of trying to spark a race war. No one wondered why an inventor had suddenly turned into some kind of vigilante. The same goes for the other trailers; no one worried that homeless people might take up arms and go on shooting sprees, for example.
And why would they? We're not exactly dealing with Oscar-calibre dramatic cinema, here. Rodriguez's work is a wacky blend of action and gore, painstakingly styled after B movies of the '70s (he also likes to plunder the cast of Lost for some reason, but I digress...). Like all Rodriguez films, Machete is high camp. If you're willing to believe it's an earnest attempt to mobilize Mexicans against Americans, then you should also believe that CIA agents are being abducted and transformed into characters on trippy kids' TV shows, or that your weird high school shop teacher really was an alien, or that strippers might eat your face off after sundown.
But then Jones' grasp of film is, um, tenuous. Remember his bizarre review of Watchmen, which he mistook for a New World Order propaganda piece? To make his take on the film even weirder, he somehow got it into his head that the same man who wrote From Hell was a Freemason. Then, months later, he praised V for Vendetta - same writer and some of the same themes as Watchmen, but basically a paean to religious terrorism and violence. WTF?
At any rate, all of this is moot now. Rodriguez has conceded that, yes, his joke trailer was a bit too incendiary, and Jones now says he doesn't want Rodriguez to lose his state funding (even though Austin 360 quotes him as saying, "We need to get the funding at the state level stripped out of the film commission if they do not stop this.").
Let's bid farewell to Paul Craig Roberts, a favourite guest of both Jones and the white supremacists at Republic Broadcasting Network's Political Cesspool. (David Duke once wrote that before PC debuted in 2004, the white man had no voice in mainstream radio. Apparently Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Imus, Glenn Beck et al don't qualify as mainstream. Or white men.)
Roberts is retiring from professional paranoia, though he might return to The Alex Jones Show once or twice.
I won't call Roberts a racist or an anti-Semite, because like all the people he excoriates for sitting on or ignoring the *truth* about his pet topics, Roberts likes to coyly dance around certain issues so that you can't quite pin him down. While his anti-war views can be appreciated even by liberals, his other views ... um, not so much. He has spent the last decade shredding the reputation he spent the other 60+ years building. Kinda sad, but also kinda familiar. I mean, Morley Safer is doing infomercials these days. I guess when you reach an advanced age, you get to be a complete moron and no one will call you on it.
To PCR fans, cheer up: There are plenty more paranoid white guys where he came from.
Soon I'll have some commentary on Jones' latest take on the Swine Flu "hoax". It's a lot of crazy to wade through.
In the meantime, let's look at an Infowars story on Hal Turner.
Hal Turner of New Jersey billed himself as "the most controversial radio host on the planet", and claimed that he shut down his show a year ago only because of all the media, interest group, and government pressure that had been brought to bear on him. In reality, he was in constant danger of being yanked off the air for making assassination threats against U.S. politicians, telling listeners, "We may have to kill some of the people you elect." Turner is also a vocal white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and anti-Semite. In addition to elected officials, he has encouraged people to assault or murder Jews, immigrants, and anyone who tries to interefere with Christmas celebrations.
Quote: "People say violence doesn't solve anything. They're wrong. Violence solves everything. You can argue with someone till you're blue in the face. They just won't change their point of view and if you knock the living shit out of them, then they change their view…I've done it. It works, and I encourage you to do it. We need a lot more violence to straighten up America."
And Jones wonders why the Cyberbullying Act exists.
After the show wrapped, Turner announced via his website that the U.S. had shipped 800 million Ameros to China. When readers expressed skepticism, he posted a video in which he held up one of the 20-dollar Amero coins. It was coppery and slightly larger than a Toonie, but details weren't visible in the shaky, low-quality vid. Turner said that one side was imprinted with the words "Union of North America", with an eagle and a map of North America. A "D" indicated it came from the Denver mint, in 2007. The Ameros were shipped to the China Development Bank, Turner explained, because the U.S. currency would collapse by February 2009. "This is irrefutable proof that shenanigans are afoot at the highest levels of the government..."
But Turner's definition of "irrefutable", just like his definition of "sanity", differs significantly from mine. The coin in his video was a collectible mock-up designed by coin designer Daniel Carr, to express his distaste for the idea of a common North American currency. Photos of it began circulating online in late 2007. It was usually misidentified as "an actual Amero".
This was pointed out to Turner, who promptly accused the government of creating Daniel Carr's website solely to discredit his factual claims. But dc-coin.com was registered in 2005.
Though Turner briefly returned to broadcasting in April of this year, he's currently in jail for urging fans to assassinate officials, politicians, and judges in two states.
Now for the scary part. Federal officials have claimed that Turner was briefly a paid FBI informant. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, some hackers also found email correspondence between Turner and an FBI handler. Your tax dollars at work.
Infowars has taken a consistently disapproving stance on Turner's behavior, but as always, personal responsibility takes a backseat to other concerns. A June story on Turner's arrest laments, "Hal Turner’s arrest feeds into the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to conflate Second Amendment advocates, 'antigovernment' activists', and veterans with white supremacists." The article hints that Turner was only posing as an anti-Semite and racist, to help further this agenda - he could be a whole lot more than just an informant, in other words.
This attitude is even more evident in the latest Infowars story on Turner, "Hal Turner Admits He Worked for the FBI". This article argues that Turner was probably a full-blown "COINTELPRO" agent, encouraged by the FBI to make terroristic threats against federal judges. He is "a classic government patsy burned by the people he attempted to collaborate with." The bulk of the article consists of other "examples" of the FBI and the Southern Poverty Law Center paying and abetting terrorists for their own ends. These cases will be examined in part II.
In Alex Jonestown, there's always someone else to blame. Lunatics like Turner and Von Brunn never act fully of their own volition, terrorists never do their own plotting, and nothing sinister gets accomplished without covert government funding.
Warning: Some strong language. Please avert your eyes if you're sensitive. Please see the post after this one for an important clarification.
UPDATE: Bingo. Jones does, indeed, blame someone other than James Von Brunn for the Holocaust Museum shooting. He blames the government (as I predicted) and the ADL (as I should have predicted). When a D.C. caller described an office evacuation that took place simultaneously, implying there was foreknowledge of the attack, Jones immediately pronounced it a "Valkyrie takeover drill". Then he pointed out that hundreds of articles about Holocaust denial have appeared in the press in the last two weeks. Earlier in the program, he said most Nazis like Von Brunn are actually agents of the ADL. Then he said something incoherent: "I wonder if they've got another old guy they had in custody 5 years ago, tried him with a gun. They told him, 'Look, we won't kill your family...just go in and shoot somebody.' The old man waddles in to do it, and the ADL and Simon Weisenthals all have a good time." I have no idea what incident he's referring to here. Let me know if you figure it out. The bottom line is, Jews arrange for these tragedies to occur and then celebrate them because it brings them one step closer to .... something or other. It's at times like this that I almost despise Alex Jones. He spent 80% of his broadcast ripping into "the fairy" Glenn Beck for linking Von Brunn to 9/11 Truthers, without any evidence. Then he accuses the ADL of staging racist terrorist attacks, without any evidence.
Jason Bermas, Jones' clone, parroted his complaint about the Holocaust denial articles by saying one of the most duuuuuuh things I've ever heard from him: "Obama went to Dachau this week, too! The Holocaust is big!"
Yes, Jason. The Holocaust is big. The murder of six million innocent civilians tends to stick in public consciousness, for some crazy reason. I realize it's not as important to you as freaking tapwater or the MIAC report, but for many of us the Holocaust was, is, and will forever be "big".
Perhaps even more sickening and alarming than Jones blaming Jews for the attack without presenting ONE shred of evidence: Not one caller even mentioned it. They prattled on about the Swine Flu pandemic, Glenn Beck, and other meaningless shit instead of saying, "Hey, man, what up with blaming Jews for this? Where's the proof?" Also, this was Jones' moneybomb day, and he easily met his goal for donations.
I am sickened by these people right now. I almost wish there was a New World Order, so these soulless and insane and self-centered idiots would end up in FEMA camps, far from telephones and radios.
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I was going to devote this post to yesterday's broadcast, 'cause it was a doozy. But the Holocaust Museum shooting deserves our attention at the moment.
Thus far, the media has blamed the following groups for James Von Brunn's actions:
9/11 Truthers: Glenn Beck declared he has been been warning his fans about Truthers "for a very long time", and said "early reports" indicate Von Brunn was a "hero" of the Truth movement. I live with a Truther, many of my friends are Truthers, and I keep a close eye and ear on events in the Truther world. I've never heard of this dude. Neither has the Significant Other, whose Truth heroes are Stephen E. Jones, the Jersey Girls, and Richard Gage. Yes, there are racists and anti-Semites in the Truth movement, but not everyone in the movement is racist and/or anti-Semitic. Perhaps the biggest sin of Truthers is not racism, but turning a blind eye to racism in the movement, rather than openly denouncing it as soon as it comes to light. This is a case of the crackpot calling the kettle black, because as I've noted several times, Beck has ranted about many a conspiracy theory on his Fox News show. In fact, he went out of his way to point out that while it's okay to "protest the Federal Reserve", it's just crazy to be a Truther.
I guess Beck didn't pick up on another early report about Von Brunn: On December 7, 1981, he walked into the Federal Reserve's D.C. headquarters with a sawed-off shotgun and a hunting knife, planning to take hostages. He served 6 years in prison for this.
Liberals: Thus far, the only "journalist" to link Von Brunn to 9/11 Truth is this woman, but even she doesn't blame Truthers for his crime. She blames liberals. Srsly.
Evolutionists: An essay thrown up at Beliefnet seconds after the shooting occurred blames racism on the theory of evolution and those who subscribe to it. 'Cause we all know there are no Christian racists. Don't be fooled by the fact that nearly all the major racist organizations in the U.S. have been Christian.
Birth certificiate doubters: The Huffington Post and Olbermann immediately picked up on the fact that Von Brunn questioned the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. And this would relate to shooting up the Holocaust Museum how, exactly? I mean, the person who flogged that conspiracy theory the hardest is Jewish.
I predict that Jones will blame the government. He'll say Von Brunn was set up by the Powers That Be to justify Homeland Security's *persecution* of right-wing extremists.
We can't really blame any racist organizations, because Von Brunn wasn't active in any. He might have joined the People Who Hate People Party, if it had ever held a single meeting.
We can't really blame stupidity; Von Brunn belonged to MENSA. I guess we could blame smart people, but I only know of one other murderer who belonged to MENSA. And let's face it, the average white supremacist isn't top-heavy with brains.
We could blame old people. After all, America's oldest school shooter was 70 years old. There could be many more bloodthirsty seniors out there... Thank God for the Lawrence Welk reruns that keep them off the streets.
We could blame guns. However, I can't recall the last time a gun hopped into a museum by itself and started shooting at guards. Guns tend to prefer quiet, dark places.
So who or what can we blame?
Let's take a cue from Von Brunn's ex-wife. She didn't offer up any scapegoats. She made it clear that Von Brunn was an alcoholic racist obsessed with what he saw as the disintegration of America.
In other words, Von Brunn was just an angry racist fuck.
Jones' Sunday broadcast was mostly about eugenics. Again. And amazingly, he repeated just about all of the same wildly inaccurate info he used last time:
- Bill Gates' father is the head of Planned Parenthood. Okay. Fine. Now that you've said it at least twice, Mr. Jones, I will just accept the fact that Bill Gates Sr. used a cool Illuminati gizmo to reduce his age by several decades, had a sex change, and took the name Cecile Richards. - Receiving three or more flu shots in your lifetime virtually guarantees that you will develop Alzheimer's. Unless some mind-flipping study results have just been published, this is still the same old unsupported crapola from Hugh Fudenberg; you're 10 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's if you have 5 consecutive yearly flu shots than if you have only one or two flu shots in your lifetime. At least Jones didn't say that "hundreds of government studies" have proven it, like he did last time. (This page named for the quack Royal Rife and his utterly worthless machine mentions a Calgary study on mercury and Alzheimers, and a similar study by anti-vaccinist Boyd Haley, but neither of them directly support Fudenberg's claims.) - James Watson had to step down as head of the Human Genome Project [chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor] last year [2007] because he said "blacks aren't human" ["blacks aren't as intelligent as whites"].
He also talked a lot about Child Protective Services. I agree with him that there are many serious flaws in the foster care system, but Jones and I aren't seeing quite the same flaws. He claims that CPS takes kids from their parents without warrant or cause and sells them for up to $500,000 to the highest bidders or to people who have put in orders for a certain kind of child. A senator told him there are even bounties on the heads of blonde, blue-eyed children in Georgia. This is very specific information. How is it, then, that no CPS workers have been charged with human trafficking? It all smacks of urban legend, not unlike the white slave trade rumours that paralyzed women with fear 60 years ago. "This is on the record!" Jones said. What records, exactly? Maybe he's referring to a record album, from K-Tel's Sh** That Never Happened collection.
Jones also insists that social work was founded only to carry out racial hygiene, spy on communities, and abduct children. I dare him to say that to Dorothy Day and Jane Addams, if/when he gets to heaven.
In Endgame, Jones included footage of Susan Hoff demanding to know why 68% of Texas foster children are on psych meds. I think I might have an answer for her: Foster kids may have actual mental or emotional problems. Wouldn't you, if this was your life?
- watching mommy and daddy whale on each other every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the occasional Wednesday - living on Kool-Aid mix straight from the package - learning social skills from Maury
According to Jones, the real racists aren't klansmen, but liberals like Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood). He says that in her letters to the Procter and Gamble and Colgate foundations, she advised they all pretend to be liberals who loved blacks, then break up families and "pay women not to have men in their houses", drug them, and hire black doctors and leaders "so they'll trust us and take the injections." While Sanger made many racist, eugenics-friendly comments in her lifetime, some of these seem over the top. They're a little too Protocols of the Elders of Zion to ring true. For one thing, Sanger really was a liberal - or what we might call a libertarian - to the core. For another, she did not advocate involuntary sterilization or any other kind of coercive interference into the sex lives of poor Americans; she believed they should be allowed to make their own reproductive choices and have access to reliable birth control for the first time in history. She did try to enlist black leaders in an effort to convince poor, religious blacks that birth control wasn't sinful, but this had nothing to do with "injections". As wrong-headed as she and other eugenicists of her era were, she wasn't out to annihilate minorities.
Jones also mentioned that a few "weird black leaders" actually attend "eugenics meetings" and approve of the elite's plans to wipe out blacks, without giving the names of the leaders or the dates and locations of the meetings. Could be anything. Remember, Jones believes that every humanitarian effort in Africa is just thinly disguised eugenics.
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."
This blog examines claims made by Alex Jones, his guests, and his associates. It is NOT a personal attack site. Disrespectful comments WILL be removed. To learn more about the purpose of this blog, check out the Intro (under Important Stuff, below).
* "Humanity’s gotta get off-world, we’ve got to get access to the life-extension technologies . . . I want the advanced life extension! I want to go to space! I want to see inter-dimensional travel! I WANT WHAT GOD PROMISED US! AND I’M NOT GOING TO SIT HERE AND LET SATAN STEAL IT!
* "Now the parallel shadow government is absorbing what's left. You know, kind of like putting an egg in vinegar, they've been dissolving our shell, turning our skeleton into rubber so they can more easily, like a demonic pelican, force us into their maw." (July 1/09 broadcast)
* "They might as well be Reptilians from Planet Pop Tart, because they're so anti-human and so different from us. What they are is a bunch of psychos."(March 16/10 broadcast)
