Exposing INFO WARS & ALEX JONES, Part I: The Controlled Opposition

First up, I should fully disclose my viewpoint: Alex Jones and Info Wars are psy-ops – psychological warfare/control operations, conducted primarily on Americans – but also more increasingly across an international audience.

I’ve said this for ages. Which is why I had a mixed reaction to the Info Wars ‘banning’ story that was played out last week to mass coverage and with tons of propaganda points being scored or claimed on all sides.

On one hand, I view Info Wars as both, (1) a toxic, cancerous entity that seems to now exist only to inflame hatred, encourage sectarianism, and to brainwash gulible people, (2) a total fake-news outlet (although it didn’t always used to be), and (3) a psy-op being run by one or more intelligence or military agencies for mass brainwashing purposes and both social and mind control.

So, on that level, Info Wars being thrown off some of the big platforms wasn’t something that seemed particularly sad to me.

On the other hand, the story didn’t quite add up to me either.

After all, there’s something odd about the heads of multiple, powerful online platforms having an emergency meeting at 3.00am (like a gathering of Bond villains meeting in a secret lair near a volcano) to decide what to do about Alex Jones: and then for them to act in unison to kick him out of their respective platforms, as if – bizarrely – they were each too scared to act on their own.

Why did they all act as one? Why didn’t they act independently and in their own time?

It’s almost as if the whole thing was a well-staged propaganda exercise. But to whose benefit?

Let’s deal with (and debunk) this current drama first – the big tech companies and their ‘banning’ of Info Wars – and then let’s explore why Info Wars already lost all of its credibility and most of its original supporters a long time ago, as well as why it is a total psy-op that exists to infect vulnerable minds and destabilise society.

This latter subject alone is so complex that it can’t really be explored properly in one article – so I’ve split this into two pieces, and the follow-up article will be devoted much more squarely to the psychological-warfare/cult dimension of this subject, where the actual scary stuff is.

I have been compiling information and content for an article on Alex Jones and Info Wars for a while now: because there’s some disturbing (and fascinating) things that emerge when you dig a couple of levels beneath the surface-level. So I’ll incorporate all of that into the follow-up article.

But, for starters, I’m calling bullshit on the ‘Info Wars Banned’ drama.

I’ve been surprised at a lot of otherwise good alternative journalists or writers seemingly accepting the story at face-value and even choosing to go with the whole ‘When they came for Alex Jones, I said nothing – when they came for me, there was no one left to speak…’ thing.

One of my first thoughts was that the whole thing was a sham to give Info Wars a massive propaganda boost and to paint Jones as the victim of corporate censorship.

After all, Jones has been predicting things for years that never come true (for example, Obama was about to declare Martial Law and place the US under a military dictatorship “imminently” for god-knows-how-many-years: or ISIS cells about to enter the US from Mexico, or Michelle Obama about to outed as a man, etc) – and maybe it was useful, for once, to have something actually *happen*.

Jones has always said the MSM and the Deep State are afraid of Info Wars and are going to shut them down (in fact, he has been saying it for almost two decades) – and now, with this big banning drama, he gets to look like this has actually happened.

But has it?

Or is this whole thing a stage-managed script? Let’s employ some critical thinking.

In fact, it was reported that Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg believed Alex Jones had actually wanted to be kicked off FB and the other platforms – for the hype and coverage it would give Info Wars. I’m not suggesting Zuckerberg is a reliable source for anything, but let’s see how this idea is borne out by other facts.

Firstly, it was being widely misreported by people on social media that Info Wars had been totally banned ‘from the Internet’. Which isn’t true – you simply have to go to the Info Wars website to see that it’s still there and very much thriving. It was only kicked off YouTube, Facebook, Apple iTunes and a couple of other platforms.

But, curiously, Apple‘s ‘banning’ of Info Wars seems to have been only partial: at the same time that Apple banned Jones’ podcast, they left Jones’s Info Wars iOS app unchallenged.

Consequently, the Info Wars app has shot up the charts on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores (the Android version of the Info Wars app remains in the Google Play store too).

Apparently, the logic given for leaving the apps alone was that these apparently did *not* violate any terms or ideals (promoting hate-speech) in the way that the other channels did – which seems slightly nonsensical, as the *content* being accessed via the apps is the same content that was deemed unfit for continued presence on iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Are we buying this?

If you’ve all decided to ban the guy, why leave him that key lifeline?

Did all these powerful heads of tech giants really not anticipate the possibility that leaving the iOS and Google Play apps in operation would give Info Wars the last laugh? Why make such a big play of ‘banning’ Info Wars if the ban is only partial?

If it’s a moral stand (and let’s be honest – Info Wars *does* deal in hate-speech on an industrial scale), then is it only a partially moral stand?

If it’s to combat “fake news” or dangerous propaganda – then is the desire to only partially combat those things?

No, that makes no sense.

Of course, all of this depends on what happens later. The apps might end up getting removed too. But, for the moment, they’re still there – and Alex Jones is winning this strange battle. He has had a massive publicity boost: and the widespread perception among his community is that he’s won this little struggle, both in propaganda terms and in actual numbers terms. His stock has risen – and he gets to play the role of the wronged victim who nevertheless fought the giants and won.

Info Wars is now currently ranked number four in the top free news apps — just behind Twitter, News Break, and Reddit. It is way ahead of all MSM apps, including CNN, Fox, BBC and all the rest. It was only the 47th most popular just prior to the big ‘banning’ controversy.

But here’s the key thing.

Apparently the app was only just launched (in June, according to most sources: though the Info Wars page promoting is dated July 13th) – so this whole drama seems like really incredible timing to drive traffic to the apps (and at a time when Facebook itself is perceived to be a waning brand that scores of people are migrating away from anyway).

The apps also of course link to the Info Wars store, where all the usual merchandise (t-shirts, skin-care products, boner pills, etc) is available.

So, here’s the timeline. (1) Info Wars launches its iOS and Android apps in June or July, but it isn’t necessarily doing very well. (2) In August, the big tech companies all suddenly, unanimously, decide to ‘ban’ Info Wars on their platforms (but only partially), leaving the newly-launched apps untouched. (3) The media then blows up this ‘story’ for maximum psy-op coverage. And finally (4) lo and behold, people surge to download the iOS and Android apps in droves, making it the fourth most popular news app virtually overnight.

What am I missing? It all reads like a fantastic marketing ploy to build up Alex Jones and Info Wars even more.

Also, Apple has taken too much credit for being the company to lead the way in banning Info Wars; apparently this isn’t true. Stitcher was the first to ban Jones’ podcasts from its platform; Spotify followed.

But, either way, it’s curious that for years of Info Wars being “offensive”, spreading hatred, racism, mysogyny and homophobia (and flogging boner pills, let’s not forget), all these big tech giants didn’t take any action – instead they all, acting as one, decided to wait until the Info Wars iOS and Android apps launched and then decided to make a huge drama of ‘banning’ Info Wars from their platforms: just in time for the Info Wars apps to receive this enormous boost from the fall-out.

I’m half convinced Alex Jones was at that secret meeting at the secret lair near the volcano.

And now? I’ve said lots of times that Alex Jones, Breitbart and some of the others ARE now part of the new ‘mainstream media’ equation (and have been for several years) – but now, in app terms, it’s official: Info Wars is currently a higher-ranked ‘news source’ than any of the traditional MSM platforms.

There is also a strong possibility that these are only temporary measures and that all the other Info Wars channels will be fully restored at some point.

We’ve seen earlier this year that a handful of medium-sized alternative news channels on YouTube were taken down, including the Richie Allen Show (76k subscribers), something called the ‘SGT Report’ and another called ‘Crowdsource the Truth’ – all of which were taken down, amid massive online protest from their followers, and then were restored.

Raising the question of what the point was of the take-downs, if the platform wasn’t going to stick to its guns?

Don’t be surprised if the same thing happens with Info Wars, being fully restored to YouTube, Facebook and Apple a few months down the line.

In which case, the only result of this whole stage-play would’ve been to drive massive traffic to the iOS and Android apps.

In the meantime, Jones and Info Wars are enjoying one of the greatest, most triumphal moments in their long history, revelling in such spin as ‘Patriots Rally Behind Infowars Amid Tech’s Total Communist Censorship’ and ‘The War to Destroy Alex Jones, Part One’.

Now, I know that a lot of people, as I said earlier – including a number of alternative media platforms – are taking all of this Info-Wars/censorship thing very seriously.

Some see it as a genuine act of mass corporate censorship that’s using Alex Jones as a test-run for a future mass take-down of multiple alternative-media platforms. Even some writers who hate Alex Jones and Info Wars have nevertheless lamented this censorship move (including people like Noam Chomsky), seeing it as a sign of what’s to come for all kinds of other alt-news platforms.

To some extent, this might be true. It probably is. Those big tech giants could be playing out this Info Wars thing to test general public reaction to that kind of censorship – and, if you’re going to do that, you’re better off doing it with a crazy, easy-to-mock figure like Jones and not with some more likeable, credible figure.

But I don’t buy the martyr act – not when it comes specifically to Alex Jones and Info Wars. I think even intelligent people are being naive: I simply can’t get around the fact that (1) the Info Wars apps just launched a month ago, (2) Apple and Google chose not to remove the Info Wars apps, and (3) the Info Wars apps have sky-rocketed in downloads and popularity since the ‘ban’.

It’s possible this was a way to both boost Info Wars’ apps, but also to allow those big tech platforms to get to look like they’re doing something to confront ‘fake news’ and hate-speech. And of course, the MSM goes along with the whole charade, framing the entire thing in the context of hate-speech versus censorship and where the line is supposed to be – possibly to pave the way for a broader censorship sweep of much smaller, much less hate-speechy sites, channels or writers in the future.

But, as far as the Info Wars story goes, there’s something of the staged drama to it.

Note that a similar, though slightly different, scam was being played out in the UK with Info Wars regular Tommy Robinson. Come to think of it, the Boris Johnson nonsense that’s gotten everyone in the UK worked up for the passed week has also been turned into a censorship story of sorts: it’s worth noting Boris’s new ‘friendship’ with former Breitbart/Trump man Steve Bannon, which – in a roundabout way – links the Boris drama to both the Tommy Robinson shit-show and the Info Wars scandal, at least thematically if not explicitly.

In that sense, the last couple of weeks have been dominated by seemingly unrelated debates about ‘censorship’ and ‘free speech’, seemingly exclusively involving right-wing or extreme right-wing voices.

I find it hard to believe in coincidences when it comes to things like this.

In each case, it feels like the ‘censorship’ pantomime is almost designed to boost those individuals’ ‘street-cred’ and portray them as martyrs to free speech – whether it’s ‘Tommy’, Alex Jones or even Boris Johnson (though I’m not lumping in Boris idealogically – only in terms of the timing of the stories).

In addition to the reasons already outlined above, there’s every reason to be wholly sceptical of anything involving Info Wars.

Info Wars is not real alternative-media, nor is it a ‘news source’: its ‘news’ is entirely pulled form other news-platforms or broadcasters. The rest (about 80 percent of it) consists entirely of opinion pieces, which basically consists of Alex Jones staring into camera and reeling off hour-long diatribes based on his own opinion (or Zionist-plant Paul Joseph Watson staring into camera with hate-filled eyes and telling us all why we should hate feminists, Muslims and homosexuals).

That’s not ‘news’ – that’s just a guy yelling at you for an hour.

On what few occasions where Info Wars claims to be producing its own ‘news’, it turns out to be bullshit (unverifiable rumours from unspecified ‘inside sources’ or scary predictions of things that never actually come to pass). Most of the rest of it consists of very carefully selected guests presented as ‘experts’ or ‘insiders’: these vary in nature, but include ‘experts’ like other psy-op agents (Jerome Corsi, Tommy Robinson, Pamela Gellar, Stefan Molnyeux, to name a few).

Interestingly, the guests who are often genuine or well-meaning voices almost invariably end up denouncing Alex Jones later on: for example, David Icke, Jesse Ventura and even Ron Paul, all of whom used to have good relationships with Jones and his platform.

There are also scores of one-time or former Info Wars employees who have since spoken out about the bullshit factory that Info Wars has long since degraded into, expressing not just annoyance with Jones but suspicions about the nature of the operation.

Know More News on YouTube has compiled footage of all these various ex-Info-Wars employees exposing the Alex Jones fraud. This includes Luke Rudowksi (We Are Change), and former Info Wars’ Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton, who both quit Info Wars after becoming disillusioned with Jones’ operation (and were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them talking about their time at the platform).

For the record, Melissa and Aaron went on to establish the excellent ‘Truthstream Media‘ YouTube channel, which is a world removed from the kind of content that Info Wars puts out (and is incomparably superior).

This list of ex Info-Wars people also includes Kurt Nemo, who was fired by Jones after challenging the platform on its blind support for Donald Trump and its stance on Israel.

Also, this same video is worth cheking out if only for the David Icke clip (about 14 minutes in). It’s worth noting that Icke used to be invited on Info Wars fairly often, but hasn’t been since Jones went full-on hate-preacher and alt-right cheerleader. Here, he is being interviewed by ex-Info-Wars employee Luke Rudowski, and he notes the shift away from any pretense of real research or investigation and towards the trend of outright hate-speech and psy-opery. On the subject in particular of the demonisation of Muslims, he cites Paul Joseph Watson (pictured below) in particular and says “I find it very unpleasant to see ‘alternative researchers’… and they’re delivering those videos with absolute hatred in their eyes and in their face. It’s sad, the way some of alternative media has gone. They’re becoming that which they claimed to be exposing… they’re becoming the polarity, becoming the means for divide-and-rule…”

Jason Bermas, who many years ago produced Alex Jones’s influential film Loose Change (exposing the 9/11 false-flag), has long since abandoned Jones and Info Wars, caling out his former associate’s outright abandonment of his earlier interests in false-flags and CIA sponsorship of Islamist terror groups, etc, in favour of full-on alt-right tropes and right-wing diatribes.

Another former Jones ally, writer/researcher Wayne Madsen, has also abandoned Info Wars, saying Jones “is a bloated, lying shitbag” peddling outright fake news and making shit up all the time.

Alex Jones himself has already been exposed – via his lawyer – as an “actor”, whose rants and breakdowns are a “performance”, playing “a character”. This came out during legal battles between Jones and his ex-wife, who – for the record – has also said that Jones (who she considers to be mentally unstable) has completely changed his world-view and mission-statement from what it used to be.

Paul Joseph Watson is also a psy-op actor, who has more and more begun to mimick Jones’s pretend anger and zeal in his vicious rants: Watson (generally regarded as a Zionist propaganda contractor) is worse than Jones, however – whereas Jones at one time seemed to do some real work in the field of 9/11 debunking, for example, Watson (pictured above, flogging Info Wars’ snake-oil juice) simply stares down the screen with hate-filled eyes, ranting about women, Muslims and liberals.

I don’t know where Watson came from (though I have suspicions): but  he somehow amassed over a million YouTube subscribers and he practically runs most of the Info Wars website now.

It’s interesting that, although he’s been in the background for some years, Watson’s real rise in prominence occured around 2015/2016 – right when the current false-flag terror wave was kicking off in Europe, along with the Migrant Crisis, and right as various anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, pro-Israel alt-right personalities began emerging with big followings on YouTube. This was the same time that the Zionist-backed ‘Rebel Media’ (featuring Watson’s friend Tommy Robinson) launched, and it was actually roughly the same time in which Alex Jones made Watson editor-at-large of Info Wars.

It was also around the same time that Steve Bannon was using Breitbart to “promote the Israeli point of view in the media” (more here).

Again, I don’t believe in coincidences when it comes to stuff like this.

In addition to all of this, various people have been telling me for years that Alex Jones is a Zionist-owned shill – based on the fact that he never, ever includes Israel or the Zionist lobbies in any of his otherwise all-encompassing, labrynthine conspiracy-theory equations. They argue that he implicates everyone from the ‘Globalists’, the UN, the EU, ‘liberals’, Muslims, feminists, the Deep State, the media, Satanists, George Soros, the ‘Illuminati’, Bildeberg, etc – but never Israel lobbyists or Zionist agencies.

I often considered this possible: but I never overly thought about it.

After all, Jones could’ve simply been someone who genuinely didn’t believe Zionist agencies were that big of a factor: and my suspicion has always been that Jones is a closet evangelical End-Timer, which would theoretically make a sympathetic view towards Israel seem logical.

In other words, I figured that could simply be his bias – but without there being anything suspect about it. We all have some degree of bias in us, after all.

And, as I had stopped visiting Info Wars many years ago, I didn’t bother keeping track of the bullshit Jones or Watson were posting or saying – except for when people specifically told me to check out certain things.

My assumption had for a time been that Jones was still the same old Alex Jones (just a shittier version), but that Paul Joseph Watson was probably the source of the shift in tone and content – and that Watson had been imposed on Jones from the outside.

Even with this, however, I had to change my mind when I actually started paying attention again to what Jones himself was saying.

And what sealed it for me, really, was coming across this stunning video of Jones doing one of his angry rants: in this particularly odd video, Jones insists that “Israeli Lobbyists” are essentially the Good Guys in his conspiracy equation and are “fighting the Globalists”. In the same rant, he – extraordinary – even condemns “self-hating Jews”.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnZWUYOCEvs

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Sorry, but as soon as anyone says “self-hating Jews”, it’s absolute concrete proof that they’re a card-carrying Zionist activist.

In the same rant still, he also talks about “Muslims” who “can’t even clean their own asses with toilet paper”. It’s unpleasant stuff – but that’s all Info Wars is now: just an unrelenting stream of unpleasantness, serving no other purpose than to brainwash people and play to their innate biases and prejudices.

To play devil’s advocate and to be fair to Jones, it might be a valid argument that “Israeli Lobbies are Fighting the Globalists” – whatever that actually means, it could conceivably be true, depending on how you view the equation. But it’s the “self-hating Jews” line that just gives the whole game away.

By the way, here’s an older article about two very fine “self hating Jews”.

The question of why Info Wars has become what it now is (and what purpose it serves) is something I’m going to explore in the follow-up article, because this article is already way longer than I intended.

But even more ludicrously overt than that “self-hating Jews” rant, there’s this. This is an actual article Info Wars published, titled ‘10 Times That God Has Hit America With a Major Disaster After the US Attempted to Divide the Land of Israel‘.

This article was published after Barack Obama and John Kerry had joined the EU and most of the UN in condemning Israel’s illegal settlement building and demolition of Palestinian homes (something I covered here). While more overt Zionist partners like Trump and Geert Wilders were making over the top statements of outrage that Obama or the EU would dare to criticse Zionist settlers, Info Wars was telling its followers that “Because Barack Obama has cursed Israel at the United Nations, America is now under a curse. The UN Security Council resolution that was passed on Friday is the biggest betrayal of Israel in modern history…’

More Grade-A bollocks followed from the article: ‘In the Scriptures we are repeatedly told that God will bless those that bless Israel and will curse those that curse Israel. When Barack Obama blocked a similar resolution that France wanted to submit for a vote in September 2015, it resulted in America being blessed, and we definitely have been blessed over the past 16 months…’

It concludes, ‘But now that Barack Obama has reversed course and has betrayed Israel, we will most assuredly be cursed.’

Yeah, I think that’s kind of the end of the argument here: at least as far as the Zionist aspect is concerned.

But the Zionist aspect is only one aspect of this complicated Info Wars business: there’s much more, which I’m going to come back to in the follow-up.

The slightly sad thing for me is that, up until about 10 years ago, I did take Alex Jones relatively seriously.

I mean, not entirely seriously: he was always a bit too over-the-top, but it was entertaining at times – now it’s just horrible to watch. Jones did do some important work in the past, in terms of dot-connecting and especially in terms of 9/11 and the Neo-Cons – in which he was probably the most prominent or important debunker of the official story in those earlyish days.

Even though I was aware, even then, of the late William Cooper’s debunking of Jones in the late 90s, I still held to some basic level of belief that Jones – though he was wrong about a bunch of stuff – was nevertheless, at his core, trying to genuinely expose certain things and uncover the truth (even if the ‘truth’ was only ever allowed to fit in with his innate biases and prevailing world-view).

Someone being wrong about some stuff isn’t a valid reason to dismiss them as conscious fakes – most of us are going to be wrong sometimes. And even ‘playing a character’ isn’t necessarily a crime: it can simply be a way to garner more attention, while nevertheless using that attention to expose important information.

But, at some point down the line, things definitely changed. Whether Jones ‘sold out’ to a higher power or whether he simply hit upon a business model that worked better for him (fear porn or anger porn, perhaps) is debatable: but the only people taking him seriously anymore are the angry, easy-to-manipulate mobs who are only looking for a daily hit of ‘hate-porn’ and confirmation bias.

The fact also seems to be that most of the genuine people or genuine info-seekers who bothered with Info Wars back in the day – or who supported it – stopped paying attention to it quite some time ago, leaving only the hate-porn enthusiasts and the gutter-section of the Internet. Arguably, Jones has known for some time that his audience has fully changed from the former to the latter, meaning that he has to all-out pander more to the latter in order to keep his business thriving.

I would be astonished if any serious researcher or thinker was still paying any attention to anything Info Wars puts out.

As previously noted, Jason Bermas, who produced those early 9/11 movies with Jones has since denounced Jones entirely, saying that his one-time associate has become something very different to what he was supposed to be in those earlier days.

That’s why my initial view was that Jones might’ve been a well-meaning(ish) guy to begin with, but underwent a change somewhere down the line. You could even track this evolution somewhat: the evolution of the guy who made whole films about 9/11 as a false-flag… to the guy who, when interviewing president-elect Donald Trump, suddenly decided 9/11 wasn’t a false-flag after all and it was all the work of those evil Arabs.

After all, it always made sense to me that  the likeliest strategy would be not to try to destroy an influential conspiracy-theorist, but to co-opt him.

It always seemed logical that, at some point, strategically-key parts of ‘alternative media’ would be co-opted or hijacked and rendered into controlled-opposition. This is also much easier if you can find someone with a big ego and a substantial profit-motive: I mean, if they tell you all you’ve got to do is allow your platform to be co-opted, but that you’ll make a few million dollars in the process and will get to be the biggest ‘alt’ platform out there, there’s a good chance that you’ll take that deal.

My view of Info Wars for many years now has been that it is not only controlled opposition, but it is a proper psy-op operation, in place – as I’ve written before – to fuel the ‘race wars’ programme, in place to inflame sectarianism and civil breakdown, to brainwash masses of gulible, vulnerable people, and to engage in mass mind-control and thought-influencing.

It isn’t at all the only thing being used for that purpose – but it’s one of the biggest and most influential tools in that equation.

But there’s a lot to that subject (of a much darker, more insidious nature), and so I’m holding that back for a second article which I’ll try to publish here tomorrow: there’s a very disturbing psychological dimension to all of this that really warrants closer attention – and which goes beyond the more simple ‘sell-out’ idea or co-opting theory and into something more worrying.

For now, it suffices to say that I’m not convinced by the ‘Info Wars Ban’ – just as I’m no longer convinced ‘Tommy Robinson’ was ever in prison.

And I expect all those platforms to reinstate Info Wars fairly soon. Even if they don’t, they’ve already done him a big favour anyway.

Read more: ‘From Hannah Arendt to Gerald Kaufman – the “Self-Hating Jews” Who Survived the Holocaust‘, ‘From OCCUPY to Charlottesville & Beyond: Identity Politics, the Gladitorial Arena and the Balkanisation of Society‘, ‘The Race War Meme – And the Truth About the Charlottesville Attack‘, ‘Trump, the ‘Alt-Right’, Nazis & the Weird Reality/Reality-TV Overlap‘, ‘Tommy Robinson’s Release Proves it Was All Psy-Op For Dumb People’…