
From a Google Image Search – Current Affairs
I made a new friend who said that he liked Alex Jones and thought that everyone should listen to what he has to say. I wanted to say a few choice words about Mr. Jones but when I searched my Alex Jones schema in my old gray matter, I found that my scaffolding was shockingly full of holes. What I did know is that he claimed on his media platforms that the Sandy Hook massacre of twenty-six school children, teachers, and staff never happened, that it was “fake news.” He was convicted in a civil suit of defamation and ordered to pay a very large financial penalty ($473M). This factoid certainly doesn’t work in favor of Jones in my estimation, but my friend is, in fact, a genius, and he thinks this guy is brilliant so, in an attempt to fill in the holes in my brain, I decided to read Alex Jones’ book The Great Reset and the War for the World.
It turns out that Alex Jones is either very paranoid and is offering us a timely warning, or has been misguided by his right-wing leanings (or both). His book is written in the style used in Bible studies as an exegesis of books by other authors. He begins with a detailed discussion of Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Klaus Schwab is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum which sponsors the annual meeting of the wealthy and powerful from around the world in Davos, Switzerland. Jones quotes a section of Schwab’s text and then reacts to it. His theory is that these world leaders are up to no good in Switzerland, or whenever they speak together. He sees “globalization” as a danger to ordinary humans. He is talking about global government rather than global trade although he does address global trade later in his book. Jones warns us that world leaders plan to rule over all nations and will destroy all national governments, economies and cultures replacing individuals with essentially human clones. They will do this through surveillance, fear, threats, whatever it takes. They will be free, we won’t.
Jones’ paranoia extends to the area of vaccines. Vaccines could be used for nefarious purposes. They could be used for mind control. They could be used to control overpopulation. They could just be toxins that are slowly killing us on behalf of the rich and powerful.
He expresses the right-wing paranoia about strategies that are supposed to be designed to improve livability factors that are being challenged by climate change. If climate change is made up or if, as right-wingers contend, humans didn’t cause it and nothing we can do will fix it, then perhaps the issue is simply being used, he suggests, as more tactical ammunition for globalists who want to corral us all into cities where we will be easy to spy on and where we can be put to work at menial tasks which limit any time we might have to exercise freedom of thought or action.
Another chapter is dedicated to the messages that environmentalists are putting out about our food. Without nitrogen-based fertilizers, the manufacture of which releases lots of CO2, we will not be able to grow enough food to feed the growing earth population. Bill Gates, for example, has a factory/research center to design plant-based meats that can replace beef, chicken, and pork because all of these animals are sources of methane emission, and contribute more to global warming than things that release CO2 directly. “What if,” asks Alex Jones, “even what is going on with our food is part of the global takeover by the wealthy class?” (Not a direct quote). He asks the same question about the supply chain.
We can all tap into this paranoia about what the rich and powerful are up to. We all would like to believe that climate change is a made-up crisis. We may not make millions or billions from fossil fuels as many of the rich and powerful have, but we have kept warm in winter and cool in summer fairly predictably with fossil fuels and we’re not sure that alternative energies are up to the job or will offer the same comfort. But we suspect that we cannot trust people in the oil and gas industries to speak the truth in these matters. Those who argue about changing our habits to lessen our CO2 emissions do not seem to have a dog in the fight as the oil and gas people do.
How paranoid should we be? Can we stop these guys from world domination? How would we go about that? Would we be willing to give up our freedom if our creature comforts were protected? Would we be willing to fight for our freedom when we have such a nebulous grasp of what freedom means that we think wearing a mask to protect us from disease is a true risk to our freedom?
Whether you believe Alex Jones’s paranoia is justified and an important forewarning of a future we always hoped to defend against or not, this man, with only an associate degree from a community college in Austin, Texas has managed to make a fortune on social media and podcasts and radio, etc., preaching the gospel against globalism and blaming everything bad on the left, while the right-wing chooses dictators as cohorts, dictators like Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia.
Is he a “shock jock” with a suitably raspy voice and the disheveled grooming of a modern philosopher, is he a true philosopher, or is he just a guy who knew how to exploit the gifts life gave him. I find him confusing. He says things we have all thought about the rich and powerful but attributes the policies that will help the globalists win to the Left, while we can clearly see that it is the Right protecting the hoarding of money with tax cuts, giving money human rights as in Citizens United v the FEC, and thus growing the power of the wealthy.
Perhaps the rich and powerful do not divide the world into left and right; rather simply by rich and not rich. I have not become an Alex Jones devotee, but I have learned more about him. If making a fortune is the test of brilliance, then well-done Alex. However, simply accruing wealth does not offer absolute proof of genius, or at least it didn’t used to. Perhaps we no longer know what true genius is. None of our heroes seem able to pass the tests of a divided nation/world.