I’m only half kidding. Maybe not even half.
Ten years ago I wrote and self-published a book about the etymology of conspiracy theories and related culture. You can still buy it, if you like. There’s three reviews and only one of them says it’s shit. Back then, Alex Jones, who I wrote to some length about, was the king of radio kooks. Although he was the most prominent and well known figure to those who were interested in the topic—either true believers or doubting researchers like me—he was far from a mainstream personality. Interviews or interactions with the mainstream media were extremely rare.
Part of the reason for this was his incoherence. Jones is a shouty, incomprehensible lunatic at the best of times who will simply steamroll anyone who tries to talk to him with a much louder and more abrasive voice and zero patience for back-and-forth debate. His mainstream appeal was similar to that of the Time Cube guy.
Nobody who didn’t already resemble one of the X-Files weekly side characters living in a trailer covered in satellite dishes took Alex Jones seriously… until he came for the Sandy Hook kids.
In America, if you are a child who is witness to a mass shooting, surviving the shooting itself is only your first trial. Your second trial is that a huge number of mainstream American conservatives will despise you. Because you, like it or not, are now a walking, talking prop in the gun control debate. If you’re a child involved in a shooting, you better be on the correct side of the gun: Be a Rittenhouse, not a David Hogg. It’s the difference between being keynote speaker at CPAC or having Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting insults at you on a street corner.
Alex Jones, like all conspiracy theorists of his type, believes that all mass shootings and major tragedies are hoaxes. Every one of them. If they pick and choose then that just opens them up to analysis about why they accept some official narratives over others, and people start asking for your evidence. So naturally he started spouting off after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. He got out the red string, started analysing photographs, measuring angles, counting the letters in the names of the victims to see how many added up to 23, the sacred number of discord. Started looking for triangles and Masonic symbols.
But this time it was different. This time Alex Jones somehow tapped into the right’s burning need for Sandy Hook to have been a Democrat hoax, for those kids and their parents to have been in on the scam. It was an election year. Political tensions were through the roof. Suddenly that gravel-voiced trailer guy barking about globalists and chemtrails and an owl-headed demon god named Molech wasn’t easily dismissed anymore. He was speaking truth to power. Sandy Hook, if such a place even existed in the first place and many said it didn’t, was never the site of a shooting. The dead kids were all made up and the “survivors” were actors, paid by the Obama administration to pretend to be victims of a gun violence event that would be used as a pretence to take all of the guns away from the population.
That’s how conspiracy theories work, from Sandy Hook to climate change denial to anti-vaccine stuff. You pick the narrative you want to be reality and then you simply declare it reality. Like reality can be voted on, like it’s answerable to a poll.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 I thought that was nuts, not just because he was a literal game show host and it seemed way too on the nose for America to make Alex Trebek or David Letterman or Al Bundy president, but also because I’d just got done doing a deep dive into conspiracy culture and I knew Trump was a true believer in a lot of these things, or at least he said he was to the extent that he believes in anything (personally I believe him to be a nihilist who neither knows nor cares what’s true about almost anything). Conspiracy theorists loved him. But the American President, traditionally, is the mortal enemy of these people, he is their Lex Luthor, whether Republican or Democrat. The same people who believe in the Clinton body count believe Bush did 9/11.
How exactly was that going to work when the president was One Of Them?
Quickly that question was answered when they came up with the idea of the “deep state,” or a shadow government still loyal to Obama that encompassed everyone in government besides Trump and his inner circle. Trump was still the underdog, David vs the Goliath of the actual government and don’t you dare call him part of the government. He was an Outsider.
But something even more bizarre than the election of the TV President, to me, and I’m not sure how many others even noticed, was seeing Alex Jones rock up to the White House with a press pass. “Infowars” wasn’t a news organization any more than my Geocities website was.
And yet.
It really wasn’t that more absurd a tabloid than Breitbart. Its boss, Steve Bannon, was also a high ranking official in Trump’s government, which essentially made Breitbart state media, and it was fucking bonkers. Bannon was the mastermind behind Gamergate, and a lot of those weirdos were showing up with press badges as well—Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos and God knows who else rubbing shoulders with CNN and Fox (and I hope they checked their wallets were still in their pockets afterwards).
The asylum doors were wide open. I didn’t even notice it had happened until I was seeing it.
Some might call me naïve or blind to expect some kind of dignity in the office of the President of the United States, that it was ever really there in the first place, but times really do feel profoundly different now in American and indeed western politics and have for almost a decade. There is something deeply unserious about it now. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Types of people who would be largely mocked as embarrassing by even their own ideological fellow travellers are now powerful movers of culture. They aren’t just influencers, not just sideshows, but legitimate high ranking members of the political sphere.
The Clown Illuminati.
If Donald Trump had not been elected then the trial balloon of putting zany in charge might have popped then and there. Trump proved that not only was bombastic scenery-chewing lunacy not a deterrent to winning office on the right, it is actually a boost, almost a prerequisite. The Trump presidency brought about the era of crazy hairstyles on right wing politicians. It’s a parallel example of what the Pick Up Artists call peacocking: Go to a bar dressed like a pirate or something as a shortcut to being interesting.
There is a reason Ron DeSantis dresses like he’s never done it himself before and stands like he’s forgotten how to use all four of his limbs—he’s trying to look batshit. His advisors tell him it’s a power move. The reason he can’t pull it off is because it doesn’t come natural to him. He’s a stuffed shirt boring politician trying to Do A Thing.
He’s trying to join a club that isn’t taking new members because it’s already full of people who all look like Batman villains.
Each one has an established character. Each one is trying to sell the brand. At some point right-wing politics became an entertainment industry. People might remark about Woke Hollywood and why it leans so liberal, why there’s no substantial right-wing equivalent to the movie industry. But there is—you’re just looking in the wrong place. Right-wing Hollywood isn’t in California, it’s in Washington DC. It ran the country for four years and it’s coming back.
You just have to look at the attendees of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republican Oscars, in which government officials, comedians, and entertainers mingle together in the knowledge that there is no longer any difference between those three things.
There’s an election coming up next year, you might have heard this on the grape vine. It’s not looking great for Joe Biden. He might win, or it might be another four years of Trump, but either way the Republicans are coming back eventually, in one year or in four. And just because Biden is an evolutionary throwback to boring politics doesn’t mean that’s where it’s staying from now on. The Republicans will be back, and you’re never getting another Bush, another Nixon, even another Reagan.
So that brings me back here: The question I want you to ask yourself.
What exactly is in the way of Alex Jones becoming President of the United States?
Jones has reached a threshold of adoration on the right that makes him a Made Man in the Scrabble Mafia. He has the full support and endorsement of both Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and once you’re under the protection of the Party, you’re essentially above the law. He’s never paid a cent of his 1.5 billion dollar court penalty for terrorizing the Sandy Hook survivors, and he doesn’t have to.
Massive legal trouble is no deterrent to a Republican presidential candidate. As shown with Trump, it turbocharges their existing popularity. His loud, manic lunacy is likewise a plus. That’s simply what debate means now. Can you imagine Alex Jones in a primary debate against Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence? He would absolutely bulldoze those guys.
I posit the only thing that makes a Jones presidency unlikely is his own lack of interest in doing the job. I haven’t a comprehensive knowledge of his statements, whether he’s ever been asked this question, but from what I do know I don’t think it seems likely that this is his ambition. He just wants to sell snake oil pills and yell into a microphone. That’s all that’s saving us. Because he’s not any different from a political, ideological, psychological, legal, temperamental, or personal perspective from Donald Trump.
But that’s not the end of the story, because once you accept that an Alex Jones presidency isn’t even unlikely, let alone impossible, you have to start wondering about the other clowns in this circus. Who are we going to see showing up in Republican primaries in the coming years?
Right off the bat, I’m relieved that the two influencers who I personally think are most likely to want to take a shot at the presidency are ineligible by birth—that’s Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, South African and Canadian respectively. You know who could do it, though? The My Pillow Guy.
He’s another barking mad Alex Jones type figure with enormous popularity on the right, incomprehensible mania, and known political ambition, having made moves toward a gubernatorial run in Minnesota.
Rudy Guiliani has run for president before. He could do it again. I don’t know that his allegiance to Trump would be enough to carry him with the youth vote. But if youth is what’s needed, Andrew Tate could run. Or, even more likely, this dipshit:
This is not just an American problem, though it is leading the charge. Right wing populism is gaining momentum in the western world and I don’t think it’s a problem that the left and liberals can solve because I don’t think it’s a problem they created.
It’s the media, and our attitudes.
At some point in the grey zone of comfort, boredom, and disillusionment we lost sight of the difference between geopolitics and entertainment. The correct person to run the country is the one who would be most interesting, or the funniest. The one who combines simple solutions with an appropriate knowledge of how to meme.
I don’t really know what we’re going to do, but I hope we figure it out before we’re looking down the barrel of President Rittenhouse.
It’s only going to keep getting worse, isn’t it?
😂 this is both hilarious and accurate and terrifying.