Holy God! Alex Jones might be right about something…!!

 …And the conspiracy culture is still as horrible as ever. So check out this Newsweek article from a couple of weeks ago. One of my students brought this to my attention, asking me what I thought about it; whether or not Jones had a valid point. I had missed the story when it originally came out, so when I read it I agreed that Jones indeed had a good a point. The article was also a textbook case of shoddy, biased news reporting that should be used as a teaching tool in any journalism class.  And I shocked myself and felt kind of unpleasant having to admit these things. But, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. 

 

The article, as you’ll see, is about Jones’ appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast where Jones said that he feared a terrorist attack on the U.S. in light of the Israel-Hamas war and the growing tensions in the Middle East. And Jones is absolutely right! Living in New Jersey, working just across the river from Manhattan and remembering 9/11, I know that I am living next to the number-one bull’s eye for every terrorist organization in the world. Hamas and every other terrorist proxy of Iran must dream at night or being able to orchestrate another mass-casualty event that will outdo 2001. Or if they wouldn’t try and attack New York, I’m sure they would just as gladly settle for Washington DC, or Los Angeles, or Miami, or any of our other major metropolitan centers. But it’s not just Jones saying this. FBI director Christopher Wray said the same things to Congress in October, warning that the Hamas massacre of October 7 created a terrorist threat to the U.S. “the likes of which we haven’t seen” since the rise of ISIS. None of this should be controversial.

 

Newsweek, unfortunately, thinks that it is, writing that Jones said this “without offering evidence.” Then the article goes on to quote what sounds like a stale Department of Homeland Security boilerplate press release stating they’re working “tirelessly” to make sure this doesn’t happen and that “encounters of known or suspected terrorists attempting to cross the Southern Border, or encounters of those associated with such individuals, are uncommon.” 

 

Uncommon? There were only 19 terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks! What number are we talking about with “uncommon?” With America’s sieve-like Southern Border, there were 2.5 million illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023!! Not fearing a terrorist attack on American soil today is willful blindness and naivete on an epic scale.

 

Jones, of course, said he “feared” that a terrorist threat was imminent, just like any sensible person should. So, it was too bad that he couldn’t offer the kind of precise, actionable intelligence Newsweek seems to want when it dismisses his statement. 

 

Now the way Jones’ argument, or anything he says, is now being framed in this kind of a rhetoric by the mainstream press is his own fault. They rightly hate him and he earned the media’s hatred. Jones earned the hatred of anyone with a shred of empathy and decency. He had been a bottom feeder and paranoia monger, stoking the hatreds and fears of the unstable and alienated prone to believing in the most extreme conspiracy theories. His theories about the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012 were used by psychotics to terrorize the families of the victims. He was sued for libel by those families and ordered to pay them $1.1 billion. He got exactly what he deserves. 

 

The point here is that indiscriminately spouting the most outrageous, the most illogical conspiracy theories serves only to taint your credibility forever. It’s a case of the conspiracy theorist who cried wolf. If you claim that evil cabals are plotting against the world every day and point your fingers at the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Satanists, the Deep State, globalist insiders and shadow governments every single day without any proof of their existence, you won’t be taken seriously even when you identify real sources of evil like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Islamist terrorists.

A new round of repulsive, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

As any sensible person who has any kind of a passing interest in conspiracy theories could have predicted, the war in Israel spawned an enormous rancid pool of creative fantasies about what is “really going on.” These fantasies raised their ugly heads literally on October 8, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, murdering some 1400 hundred people—including small children and toddlers, some of whom they beheaded or burned alive—and taking over 200 people hostage. Before the smoke from the gunfire and explosions had even cleared, the internet was being flooded by the reprehensible sludge of conspiracy theories about how Hamas was not really behind the attacks. The crux of these conspiracies is the “false flag” conspiracy theory, or the “crisis actor” conspiracy theory. It says that Israel was actually behind the attacks, killing its own people, or that no one was killed and the grieving Israelis we see on TV are actually pretending to have lost loved ones. These are more reprehensible examples of how conspiracy theorizing is still the tool of political opportunists and those so devoid of any human decency as to get some pleasure out of inflaming hatred, violence, and divisions among people.

 

One just needs to place the word “conspiracy” after “Israel and Hamas” in Google and the sites propagating them will pop up. All the usual suspects like State of the Nation, Before It’s News, and scores of others had started spinning out these yarns immediately after the October 7 attacks. Afterward, naturally, the pro-Hamas extremists protesting Israel’s retaliation against the attacks are espousing the same conspiracy theories, as are the worthless scum tearing down posters with the pictures of the hostages still held by Hamas.

 

The ongoing frustration for any clear and rational-thinking individual is that so many people can’t see how absurd it is to put your faith in sources of information that claim EVERY single world event is a conspiracy theory. Maybe if there was a site out there that claimed the only major conspiracy was the JFK assassination and not blame every other headline on hidden cabals, one might think seriously about whether or not they might have a point. Or the only conspiracy is the one that involves UFOs. Or maybe the one about the suppressed technology that could make the water-powered, non-polluting car a reality. But every major event is a conspiracy? Sure, only a fool would take professional conspiracy mongers like that seriously.

 

Unfortunately, too many people like that exist. These are the unfortunate souls completely alienated from consensus reality, perhaps those who feel so powerless and without a voice that they find these convoluted tales about hidden forces of evil running the world plausible and the cause of all their misery.

 

Then there are the ones in America’s so-called “elite” universities who’ve now fallen into this same trap of irrational and ugly conspiracism as well. These are the people who should know better, the ones who are supposed to be molded into the future intellectual leaders of society. Unfortunately, at any number of pro-Palestinian rallies at these universities, one can find the just as many people who believe in the crisis actor conspiracy theories or claims that the all the video footage of the October 7 attacks were created by Artificial Intelligence programs. Hearing the marginalized, those who are down on their luck or lacking any prospects in life espousing conspiracy theories is one thing. It’s a terrible situation, of course, but it’s somewhat understandable. But seeing a student from George Washington University telling reporters that she felt it very likely that the Hamas attack videos were created by AI makes me fear the future. The world is suddenly looking more and more like 1930s Germany and now even those who are supposed to be our best and brightest are protesting and shouting anti-Semitic slogans. It’s a modern tragedy.

 

The death of physical media might take cancel culture to a whole new level!

Are there favorite movies you just love to watch over and over again? A TV show that’s kind of like comfort food you can always go back to and binge watch? Fans of “Friends” and “The Golden Girls” always talk about how they can always unwind from life’s stresses by going back and watching a good marathon session of back-to-back episodes. For me they’re Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood movies. I think I could put on a one man show theatrical production of every “Rocky” and “Rambo” movie where I would play every role and recite all the dialogue perfectly. From television it has the be “Columbo,” the greatest mystery series ever, in my opinion. But if you rely on streaming services to watch your old favorites rather than purchasing them on physical media like DVDs, Blu Rays, or 4K discs, you better think again about whether or not those films and TV shows will always be available at the push of a button.

 

Now sure, you say, you are familiar with how streaming services rotate shows and movies in and out. But that’s not a problem for you because you purchased digital downloads of your favorite entertainment. You own them. They’re in your account in Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ or whatever streaming service you’re using. 

 

Well, no so fast! One day you might want to re-watch and old favorite, only to find that it’s gone forever.

 

I was recently interviewed for this Fox Business News story about the rapid movement to replace physical media with streaming and some of the legal details of streaming that many people might not be aware of. These legal details could seriously limit access to media content in the future. 

 

As the article details, retailers have started moving away from selling physical media. Sometime early next year Best Buy will no longer be selling discs. Other retailers might follow suit. So, if the only place you can access films and TV shows—or music for that matter—is a streaming service, you will be left at the whims of when those streamers decide to make the content available. And, more importantly, the article explains, “buying” those movies, TV shows, and music might not offer you unlimited access to your content either. Because when you pay for that content, you are actually paying for a license to play that content on your own devices. Those movies don’t belong to you the same way that your DVD or Blu Ray does. The copyright holder of that content has the right to withdraw that content any time they like. You could one day log into your Netflix or Amazon Prime account, looking to watch one of the favorites you purchased, and find it gone from your digital collection. It is perfectly legal.

 

Or if that favorite old film does not completely disappear, it could suddenly alter. It could become much more politically correct! Remember the recent controversies over the publishers censoring Roald Dahl’s books and several of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels? Imagine that happening to old movies and TV shows because they don’t have enough minority characters in them, or because white actors are playing characters of color. Imagine dialogue suddenly changing. Or, given the fast-advancing state of artificial intelligence technology, you might see all of this old content altering into whatever fits current attitudes and fashions. It’s America’s version of China’s cultural revolution under Mao looming over us, where our entire cultural history stands to be wiped away to please the unsilent politically correct fringes who seem to be offended for a living and can’t make it through a day without throwing tantrums about being oppressed by TV shows, commercials, books, or Internet memes.

 

But read the article…and fear for the future.

 

And buy your favorite movies, TV shows, music—and books, for that matter—in physical media if you can.

I’m profiled in the AJCU’s “Connections”

I’m honored to be profiled in the recent edition of “Connections,” the online magazine of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. You can check it out right here. 

 

It’s an overview of classes I teach, my research and commentary on mass media issues, popular culture and popular entertainment and why I think certain media products like vampire stories and this summer’s Barbie movie touch the collective nerves in audiences to make these products blockbuster successes. Barbie and vampires I had written about in this blog earlier as well.

 

I also discuss how my research into fandom led me to my interest in the conspiracy theory phenomenon. As I discuss, conspiracy theorists are basically no different from Trekkies writing fan fiction. Just like the fan fiction writer wants to take control of some text he did not originally create and make his own—often subvert it and rewrite it—so do conspiracy theorists want to write their own fan fiction about every day’s headlines. They want to take reality and reinvent, to rewrite those headlines to match the creative fantasies inside the conspiracist’s head. Of all the classes I teach, the one about the conspiracy theories, I firmly believe, is my most important one.