Anatomy of an Alex Jones Fan

artist's crappy rendering of "Steve"

On 4/20, my Significant Other stopped by a cannabis rally to give his pot activist buddies a bit of good news: An NDP candidate had said, on the record, that he supports legalization. The Signif Other isn't a cannabis aficionado, himself, but over the years has forged ties with pot activists who support peace/anti-war efforts and the 9/11 Truth movement.

Now as you can imagine, 4/20 rallies tend to be casual affairs. This particular one had a small stage-like setup, but no PA system and no schedule. Through the crowd, the Signif Other spotted a fellow he has encountered many times in the past few years, a medical marijuana activist who was once head of a provincial Marijuana Party. We'll call him Steve.

Steve may look and sound like a granola-lovin', tree-huggin' socialist, and in some respects he is. He claims to be a peacenik and an admirer of Gandhi. But he's also a hardcore Alex Jones fan.

Most of the Alex Jones fans I've encountered understand that Jones can get his facts a little, um, confused, and they take him with a grain of salt. They appreciate his overall message without necessarily believing that Bill Gates is trying to kill them, or that schizophrenics are demonically possessed, or that pi is 33.
Then there are those rare few who live, breath, and defecate Alex Jones. They deck themselves out in his merchandise, watch his entire show every day, and preface every other sentence with, "Alex says..."

These people are, quite frankly, insane. Not mentally ill. Just insane. Of the hardcore Jones fans I have met, not one exhibited a single symptom of emotional stability or common sense. One guy popped up out of nowhere, illegally plastered my neighborhood utility boxes and light poles with Infowars posters declaring "THERE'S POISON IN THE WATER" for several days, then vanished. He didn't round up other concerned citizens and petition the city council to stop putting fluoride in our municipal water supply. He didn't sponsor an educational seminar on the hazards of fluoridation. He just freaked everybody out and left.
Another hardcore Jones fan was TrutherBitch. She literally could not utter a sentence without inserting "Alex Jones", and her mass emails were batsh** insanity on crank. She was heavily invested in one of those Scamway-style MLMs.
Then there's Steve. When he learned I was the author of this blog, he growled at me. Actually growled. Like a dog when you get too close to something it's trying to bury.
His Twitter feed has exactly one subscription: Infowars.

Anyway, back to 4/20. The Signif Other saw Steve standing on the edge of the stage, hollering something. Steve didn't seem to be addressing the wandering, distracted crowd, though he later insisted he was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (as every hardcore Alex Jones fan knows, ALL CAPS convey that you are CREDIBLE and IMPORTANT).
The Signif Other wandered over to the stage and called out something like, "Steve! Hey, Steve! I have some good news!"
Steve didn't respond, but a few seconds later he hopped off the platform, stalked directly up to the Signif Other, and threw a sheet of paper in his face. He growled something along the lines of, "Don't you ever do that to me again. I was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT." Then he stomped away without a word of explanation.

The Signif Other told me about this later in the day. I said, "Well, you shouldn't have interrupted someone who was on a stage. That was kinda douchey."
He said, "I didn't know he was making an announcement. I thought he was just yelling at somebody. I felt bad when I realized he was actually trying to say something." Undoubtedly, he would have apologized to Steve the next time he ran into him. It was one of those minor misunderstandings that happens all the time.

Fifteen hours later, we received an e-mailed death threat from Steve. I can't repeat 98% of it here, 'cause this is sort of a PG-13 blog, but the gist was that the Signif Other had deliberately interfered with a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT, COINTELPRO-style, and in so doing had "dishonored" Steve. One line was "Notice the abundance of scars on my knuckles. You will keep your f***ing mouth shut whenever I speak" (emphasis in original). Another was "I'll wipe your blood up with your family." Another was "Stay the f*** out of this visionary genius's way or you'll get walked on." You get the drift. It was a rambling, paranoid, two-page screed about all the ways and means and desires Steve has to inflict violence on those who disrespect him. You know, like Gandhi.

This letter was followed by a spate of other bizarre emails and messages, like, "The dishonoring stands until you honor me again."

Now I'm not saying that Steve is representative of Alex Jones fans. He sure as hell isn't representative of hippies, Canadians, or potheads. But maybe you can tell me why so many of Jones' hardcore admirers seem to be unhinged paranoiacs with massive chips on their shoulders...

Please Stop with the David Duke Videos

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.