what alex jones really fears: experts
Spin Magazine decided to do an in-depth profile of Alex Jones who, with a yuuge thanks to Trump and the sad, sad state of what we have no choice but to call political discourse today, has finally become a household name. If you spent any time as a tourist in conspiracy land, there’s not much new for you there in terms of revelations. He rambles about the stock Illuminati and New World Order bogeymen, shills for his line of supplements, plugs his website, rinse, repeat. But there is something that profile brought into very stark and obvious focus about what Jones actually pictures in his mind when he talks about a coming authoritarian global government. He calls them technocrats, his fans in Russia and internet Russophiles call them technologists, but they all really mean experts with high visibility and influence advocating for any sort of significant change in how things are typically done.
Basically, to put this as bluntly as possible, Jones & Co. are telling all of their listeners not to listen to the experts and stand up to them, otherwise, those experts might team up — and here’s the really sinister part — recommend the kinds of things he and his fans might not like based on their experience and the data at hand. And that’s kind of scary to consider for a minute. Millions of people being fed the idea that experts are bad, experts are out to get them, all those experts are planning their enslavement if not outright demise, they will all lie, and cheat, and steal, then sit around at their secret cabal meetings and laugh about how they’ve screwed you, while helping themselves to a sex slave or three. Just imagine if you have any sort of expertise and gain any visibility in the future, then use it to advocate for a change you know will be beneficial in the long term. You’ll be yet another target for Jones’ anti-expert crusade.
Hold on a minute though, readers with almost superhuman memory would say, didn’t you once agree with a scathing critique of the technocrats who are often promoted by TED, lambasting them for their undemocratic ways? And my response to them is twofold. First, how do you even remember that? And second, I agree that there are bad technocrats who think their professional opinion is so important, it should be unburdened by debate or concerns from the public on which they wish to impose it. These kinds of experts need to get smacked down from the pedestals on which they put themselves. However, I’d hesitate to say that the idea of an expert’s opinion in a subject matter in which he or she is an expert shouldn’t have more weight than that of a layperson is in any way flawed. That’s why we pay them to be experts, to know more about a certain topic and to consider nuances we don’t even think of while weighing in on something important or at least of general interest.
And yes, it would be one thing if Jones had concrete proof of technocrats in a middle of a plan to mislead the public about something, but he never does. He preaches the message of rebellion against the government, and industry, and corporate stooges aligned with sinister forces parading experts ready to do all their sinister planning and implementation, like a televangelist preaches to his followers to follow the word of God while incidentally giving him money so he can spread that word farther and wider, and cure what ails them with miracle potions and lotions he’ll send them. But amped up to oppose everything and anything that sounds official or technical, and with few real things to sink his teeth into, Jones’ fans are left rising up against conspiracies from the thinnest, flimsiest, and vaguest rumors from the darkest and least informed rumor mills on the web, and constantly hungry for the next sign of evildoing from all the suits on TV and in the press talking about how the world is changing.
That’s how a publicly announced routine military exercise becomes a dress rehearsal for a New World Orders’ imposition of martial law, how a drought almost certainly caused by global warming becomes proof of chemtrails and weather manipulation by a nuclear weapons test detector, and how the 2012 doomsday craze became a conspiracy to distract from the real conspiracies, as referenced by the Spin profile. If there’s anything Jones mastered preaching to the tinfoil choir, it’s how to maintain and monetize paranoia under the M.O. that just because someone might be out there and could be out to get you has to mean that they’re definitely out there plotting your enslavement or demise, so you better tune in, sign up for InfoWars, and buy his supplements to ward off all those evil Illuminati, Jews, Masons, and black helicopters…
