bearkat42
Well-Known Member
Alex Jones earned his spot in Donald Trump's basket of deplorables by being the king of the conspiracy theorists
During my college years in the mid-to-late ’90s, Austin’s public access TV shows provided my friends and me with a frequent source of low-cost entertainment. We gathered to watch and to mock. One young host, barely older than us, ran a political talk show that became a frequent source of amusement. He was hard not to watch, with his paranoid, unhinged affect and elaborate conspiracy theories. He was fun to laugh at. How could anybody buy what this kook was selling?
Flash forward nearly two decades to the 2016 Republican National Convention, where that man, Alex Jones, reigned like a king.
Not officially, of course. The convention was supposed to be about the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. But as a journalist on the ground, I couldn’t help but notice that a T-shirt reading “Hillary For Prison 2016″ was everywhere. On the back was the unmistakable logo for Infowars, Jones’s multimedia company that pumps out an endless stream of videos, articles and radio shows geared toward spreading every political conspiracy theory you can imagine, from Hillary Clinton’s supposed brain damage to President Barack Obama’s “faked” birth certificate.
At times, it seemed like a quarter of the men at the convention were wearing this shirt, something that many other journalists noticed as well. Inside the convention, chants of “lock her up” kept on erupting, demanding that the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton be arrested for crimes that exist only in the minds of conspiracy theorists like Jones and his audience.
Jones and his conspiracy theories had conquered the Republican Party.
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/03/the-dangerous-rise-of-alex-jones-how-austins-pet-conspiracy-kook-conquered-the-republican-party/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
During my college years in the mid-to-late ’90s, Austin’s public access TV shows provided my friends and me with a frequent source of low-cost entertainment. We gathered to watch and to mock. One young host, barely older than us, ran a political talk show that became a frequent source of amusement. He was hard not to watch, with his paranoid, unhinged affect and elaborate conspiracy theories. He was fun to laugh at. How could anybody buy what this kook was selling?
Flash forward nearly two decades to the 2016 Republican National Convention, where that man, Alex Jones, reigned like a king.
Not officially, of course. The convention was supposed to be about the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. But as a journalist on the ground, I couldn’t help but notice that a T-shirt reading “Hillary For Prison 2016″ was everywhere. On the back was the unmistakable logo for Infowars, Jones’s multimedia company that pumps out an endless stream of videos, articles and radio shows geared toward spreading every political conspiracy theory you can imagine, from Hillary Clinton’s supposed brain damage to President Barack Obama’s “faked” birth certificate.
At times, it seemed like a quarter of the men at the convention were wearing this shirt, something that many other journalists noticed as well. Inside the convention, chants of “lock her up” kept on erupting, demanding that the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton be arrested for crimes that exist only in the minds of conspiracy theorists like Jones and his audience.
Jones and his conspiracy theories had conquered the Republican Party.
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/03/the-dangerous-rise-of-alex-jones-how-austins-pet-conspiracy-kook-conquered-the-republican-party/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow