Thursday, May 08, 2014

SOLE - Why the Alex Jones Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled

http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/4d/d9/4dd95c5b907f3d04148c9c171c61a346.jpg

This is an excellent article - although Alex Jones is so bat shit crazy that he is an easy target for a take down. Still, rap artist SOLE does it well. [The rap video, however, is likely an acquired taste.]

Here are just a few paragraphs, from The Daily Dot.

Why the Alex Jones industrial complex must be dismantled

BY SOLE

About a week ago I released a new video called "Fuck Alex Jones." Since the track has been released I've been bombarded with hundreds if not thousands of angry comments from the Infowars crowd, calling me a "faget," a sheep, and a "New World Order shill."

* * * * *
I went after Jones specifically because almost all of his propaganda plays into the hands of the extreme right wing in the United States. He dismisses feminism and gay rights as part of a New Word Order plot to reduce the population. He dismisses climate change as a hoax, and backs it up by giving weather reports on Mars. He attacks non-existent, nameless, faceless organizations like the Illuminati but ignores the evils being done by right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers.

His supporters are certified experts on the Bilderberg Group, but they seem to know nothing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that literally writes laws for corporations and passes them into law. Who needs the Illuminati when you have people like that? What if we just do away with the word "Illuminati" and start talking about capitalism and the state?

You will never hear conspiracy theorists talk about class war; they are far more concerned with preserving their own status in this economic system. Like missionaries and populist demagogues of the past, they prey on the young and downtrodden, give them an all-encompassing worldview, call it "truth, and and label everyone who doesn't believe it a "sheep" who needs to "wake up."

I attack Infowars because it is not a revolutionary movement. It is chasing a mirage. It imagines the good ol’ days of 'merica, when white slave-owners wrote a constitution for other property owners, before they pushed west, killed multitudes of Native Americans (historical estimates range between 30-100 million) and stole their land. Those are the glory days of 1776 that the right-wing conspiracy crowd holds up as an ideal that we need to return to.

Will someone please tell them that those days never left us? It’s not the Illuminati that are sending drones to kill children in Yemen or having the NSA spy on us; it’s the logical endgame to the "spirit of 1776."

What just played out in Bundy Ranch is instructive in this light. According to the cult of Jones, we shouldn't worry about homeless people in cities being pushed out of the common spaces; we should worry about a white rancher in Nevada having his "liberty" trampled by the federal government. Both lay concerns of how public space should be used, but the latter believes that rights of cows to encroach on protected habitats is more important than the right of a homeless people to cover their bodies when they sleep outside in the winter.

Many criticize Jones because he uses his Prison Planet ™ store to sell things like expensive water filters and male enhancement pills, but what he is really selling is fear. His show is a never-ending litany of new things to be afraid of: FEMA camps, cities stockpiling hundreds of thousands of body bags, a government that knows everything you’re gonna do before you do. Name your fear, and Alex is selling it!

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