Fake News Shoots Itself Over Alex Jones

In the way of these things, the narratives surrounding the banning of Alex Jones from Facebook, Apple, Spotify, Youtube, McDonalds and meetings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are as predictable as they are dull.

You have the usual arguments about free speech — or as some of the left have taken to calling it ‘freeze peach’ (oh tres droll) — with the tired riposte of ‘but they are private companies.’

Then there is the hackneyed advocates of ‘hate speech’, and the equally tired arguments about who decides what hate speech is, with the attendant obvious hypocrisies as hi-lighted by the hypocrite Candice Owens.

And there are any number of other ongoing ‘debates’ into which we could cut and paste the name Alex Jones, in order to spend a pleasant hour or two re-enforcing the political divisions of the algorithm.

Some years ago a journalist wrote about an interesting experiment they conducted, in which they took two phones and set one to follow a ‘left wing’ algo, and the other to follow a ‘right wing’ algo, and then noted the content the tech companies decided they would prefer.

Unsurprisingly after a short while they noticed a wide divergence in content.

The ‘left wing’ phone was fretting about latent sexism within the service animal community, leading to the need for safe spaces for lesbian ponies.

The ‘right wing’ phone was warning darkly about transgender Jews disguising themselves as vegan Muslims to lobby for more cycle lanes.

Equally unsurprising, if you are wired into the ‘left wing’ algo, your view of Alex Jones is — despite probably never having watched anything he has ever said — that you are positive he is a hate-filled bigot who shot the kids at Sandy Hook.

And if you hooked into the ‘right wing’ algo he’s a lovable old kook, who talks common-sense and slays SJWs.

Having listened to Mr Jones for many years, on and off, I take a rather different view.

For instance, I first happened across him when he was at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, with his bull-horn.

And the curious thing is that he was pretty much left wing — or what ‘left wing’ would become in the years later following Occupy — minus the jazz hands and the intersectionality.

As I recall he was there with the protestors, who were being counter-protested by the Teacher’s Union, who apparently then were all in favour of the WTO, and whatever that organisation was meeting to arrange.

In fact when you stop and look at the things Alex Jones talks about — organic food, vaccines, anti-war stuff (like his freak out over Syria), etc — he is pretty much our archetypal 90’s leftist.

Fine, he paints himself as somewhat of a bible-thumping patriot at times, but even that is not particularly an un-leftist position in the 90's.

It is what Peter Hitchens calls the ‘patriot left’; that has in the UK been the much abused and long neglected backbone of the Labour party (when it isn’t voting UKIP).

At which point we could go into the split in the left that occurred at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

Personally I see this split as mirroring the split of the Italian Socialists, following Italy’s entry into WWI, between the pro-war Socialists, and the anti-war Socialists. The pro-war Socialists would eventually become the Fascists, and the anti-war the Communists — or various variants of both groups.

But since these terms have become so loaded, and currently toxic in terms of political debate, I mention this only because I think it useful, and not to make value judgements.

Though given that Jones is often accused of being a Fascist, and often fires back with accusations of Communism, perhaps it is of relevance.

But not nearly of so much relevance as the cultural appropriation of Jones’ memes.

Practically before the last pint of chardonnay had dried in Hilary’s glass on election night, every Raw Story reader and xe’s companion animal were referring to themselves as the Resistance — something Jones has long claimed.

They weren’t only going to resist, it was going to be civil war (another of Jones’s themes). And the FEMA camps that Jones had long claimed were meant for ‘bitter clingers’ and ‘anyone not buying Brain Force’ — and his opponents, when they took breather while being bussed between protests at Hobby Lobby and Chick Fillet, called him paranoid for inventing — now suddenly, those FEMA camps — that didn’t exist — were going to be used to gas Muslims and re-educate Non-Binary Valley Girls from Peoria.

People who had spent the entirety Obama years being informed via the algo that it was all lies about Obama and Citibank, suddenly became financial sleuths pouring over the details of Trumps crooked dealing (as imagined by Rachel Maddow), and pointing to vast international conspiracies involving the Russians.

In fact it was all rather odd to watch how much of Jones’ schtick was either out-right purloined, or adapted to fit the non-narratives of the left — in current year — you know the stuff the left created because the leftism of the 90’s was unfit for purpose in the new progressive era… not triangular enough… or something… white people… RIOT….

But then in fairness a lot of Alex Jones’ material was nicked from Mae Brussell, certainly a lot of the JFK and Nazi stuff.

Personally I watched Alex Jones less for the content of what he said — though some of it was interesting, like the Bilderberg stuff — than for his preaching style — that and the length of the show was ideal background noise while playing video games, without the annoyance of the algo, on autoplay, endlessly jumping between Big Foot sightings and a so called documentary on the hidden history of Freemasons… rest assured if you have watched Alex Jones the algo quickly decides you will be interested in an interview with Hitler’s Alien Barber….

And fine, no doubt the companies have had complaints…. and no doubt these complaints have been numerous… perhaps not genuine, but certainly plentiful…

And we are all aware that the plan is for the internet to become some form of cable television, with the big media companies forcing us to watch the content that we don’t want to watch on television —and pay extra to watch the ‘off reservation’ content that we do want to watch. And we’ll all be expected to have an internet passport that will fine us for watching or saying ‘naughty’ things.

But I can’t help feeling that the companies who took this decision today are shooting themselves in the foot.

If they just fixed the algorithm, to provide a more general content, this extreme political divide would not occur.

Or better still stop interfering.

It doesn’t matter how much money the media companies throw at the tech companies, the reason people are not watching your content has nothing to do with Alex Jones — beyond his content just being better than yours.

Though if you are in the mood for a good conspiracy, keep you eye on Trump and his much talked about, at the time of the election, media network… with *cough* Alex Jones.