Thoughts on the Alex Jones Saga: “Conspiracy Theories” the Good, the Bad, and the Bogus

By Steven Yates

August 16, 2022

The Alex Jones Saga.

As most readers doubtless know, Alex Jones has been ordered to pay a whopping $49.3 million to two Sandy Hook parents whose child was allegedly killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

This may be the largest defamation award of all time, and with two more suits against Jones pending, combined awards might end up accomplishing what the Establishment wants, which is to put Jones’s media organization out of business.

I’ll admit, I’ve never been an Alex Jones fan. His bombast, exceeding that of the late Rush Limbaugh, was always too much for me. Sometimes, especially when appearing as a guest on someone else’s show, he simply lost it. Almost a decade ago, Piers Morgan interviewed him on gun control. For the first couple of minutes, Jones made reasonable arguments, however animated. Then he launched into a tirade. I know it’s CNN, but watch. Note that having deep-sixed Jones’s own channel, YouTube hasn’t censored this. Morgan, representing the Establishment, comes off cool and collected. Jones sounds like a loon. I did not trust him after that.

That said, we must acknowledge that he was in the forefront of those exposing globalism. He drew attention to unanswered questions raised by the Oklahoma City Bombing and, six years later, 9/11. Mainstream corporate media hated his guts from the get-go, especially when his audience began to rival theirs in size.

The question: did he go too far with Sandy Hook?

After all, it’s one thing to criticize members of the political class or other highly visible public figures as not being what they seem, or as working for malevolent powers. First Amendment rights afford lassitude regarding such.

It is quite another to claim that private citizens, such as Sandy Hook parents, are really “crisis actors,” in the context of claiming that one of the worst alleged mass shootings of the past decade was a hoax concocted by the Obama-era Deep State with the intent of bringing about more gun control.

Someone doing the latter better have all his ducks in a row, because the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect such allegations unless they could be backed up with rock-solid evidence!

Conspiracy Claims Can Go Overboard.

Before penning this, I checked my archive. Did I write anything about Sandy Hook when it happened? I found nothing on it here, or elsewhere. Looks like I went mostly silent for several months. Sometimes my “muse” deserts me. Or is overridden by circumstances. In 2012 I was exploring a foreign country, learning its language, meeting new people. Except for the election, what was going on in the U.S. was mostly off my mind.

Researching it a little now, I’m unsure what I would have said then. So this may be 20-20 hindsight.

First, some people go overboard with conspiracy claims. Not everything bad, or every act of violence, can be blamed on nefarious agencies. As the quasi-Freudian quip goes, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

Second, as I’ve often noted, much of what I write about doesn’t fit the conspiracy label. It relies on published materials, some penned by the “conspirators” themselves or by those who have been close to them: readily available if you know where to look. If a conspiracy is something hidden from you, then superelite agencies — GloboCorp, if you prefer — are not hiding but just exploiting public preferences for what the Kardashians did this week. So we shouldn’t use that label. I’ve used the term directed history a time or two.

Third, when searching for conspiracy claims about Sandy Hook specifically, one thing stands out: disproportionately severe and costly backlash against those making them.

James Tracy, formerly a communications professor at a South Florida university, also alleged that Sandy Hook was a hoax. By 2015 he’d lost his teaching career following a legal battle with Sandy Hook parent Lenny Pozner over whether his son Noah had ever existed. Tracy had declared Pozner’s son’s birth and death certificates to be forgeries.

Jim Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor, and another author, co-edited a book of essays entitled Nobody Died At Sandy Hook (2015), which made the same claims as Tracy. Amazon carried the book for a while, then banned it. Pozner also sued Fetzer for defamation and was awarded $450,000!

I would have avoided the subject, but then I discovered this article by Ron Unz: a gamechanger I recommend wholeheartedly! Even before finishing this! Go there! I’ll wait!

Cognitive Infiltration: What It Is, Why It Is Dangerous.

Unz cited an author not (yet) widely known: Michael Collins Piper, who wrote several books critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He specifically criticized the U.S.’s unconditional support for Israel. This made him powerful enemies, and he died in relative poverty in 2015. His posthumously published False Flags (2019) argues what seems to me a plausible thesis going something like this:

The IT Revolution, especially the Internet, made centralized control over information impossible. By the turn of the millennium we were in a period in which anyone could research anything and put the results on a website or blog available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Then one could build an email list and distribute their information to a huge and expanding audience.

This was our Gutenberg moment. But it arrived with its own dangers. You could find sober commentary on real world effects of globalization that differed greatly from what George W. Bush’s court economists said. You could also find claims that the Bush administration answered to space aliens.

Piper put his finger on something that occurred to me long ago: how easy it would have been back then (maybe still is) for globalists to “seed” the Internet with bogus “conspiracy theories,” planting what were already called urban legends, then get them in front of the Alex Joneses of the world hoping they would excitedly latch onto them. Those whose critical thinking skills had not atrophied would turn away, thinking all claims of nefarious activity behind the scenes are the province of nutjobs.

The process is called cognitive infiltration.

I’ve happened upon conspiracy claims I can’t take seriously. Some sound credible until you think them through.

Surely we noticed that mixed in with sober analyses of whether jet fuel could burn hot enough to bring down the steel-reinforced Twin Towers into their own footprint on 9/11 are claims that there were no planes! Those were holograms! Directed energy weapons brought down the Towers!

This is one such claim. There are others.

And what bothered me about films like Loose Change, which contended that a missile, not a plane, struck the Pentagon, were two simple questions.

First, the approaching plane was seen/heard by hundreds of people in vehicles or on foot that morning. If a missile hit the Pentagon, what happened to the plane? How was it gotten out of Washington airspace without anyone seeing it, or tracking it on radar?

Second, where was the missile fired from? Answers to such queries (when addressed at all) left me dissatisfied. These elements of 9/11-was-an-inside-job claims seemed dubious — unlike very credible claims that the event was known about in advance because it was planned in advance, and that something other than burning jet fuel brought down the Towers. Not to mention the loopy idea that Congress pulled the 400-plus page USA Patriot Act out of their derrieres in just six weeks!

Were we seeing calculated efforts to destroy the credibility of all inside-job / false flag thinking about 9/11?

Is Cognitive Infiltration Making Us Crazy?

It is difficult to write from this perspective, because so many patriots are sold on claims that ultimately don’t make sense. These well-meaning folks appear to constitute a substantial audience.

Talk radio show hosts thus risk alienating listeners by being nuanced, by suggesting, “Wait a minute…. Let’s think carefully about this.”

Writers such as myself risk losing readers.

When I revealed my doubts about the-moon-landings-were-faked thinking a couple of years ago (here and here), I received hostile emails saying I’d destroyed my credibility, a few saying they’d never read anything I wrote ever again!

The problem: I just can’t envision tens of thousands of engineers being fooled in pretty much the same way seven straight times! Engineers are not stupid! Thus the envisioned scenario seems to me highly unlikely!

And: what about the upsurge of flat-earthism over the past few years?

I am unable to engage at all something so patently ridiculous. Once a flat-earther replied to my sole online comment on the subject with something like, “Newton led the Royal Society! The Royal Society was controlled by Freemasonry! Freemasonry serves Satan! Therefore Newton’s theory and globism [sic.] are Satanic! Gravity doesn’t exist! Show me some gravity! Things float in water, do they not? Where’s the gravity there?”

That wasn’t exactly it (I’m going from memory), but it’s in the ballpark. How do you answer a screed like that? You don’t. You do the only thing you can. You walk away.

If such things are credible — if Satan has deceived us all to that extent — then we might as well give up seeking knowledge about the world altogether. My convictions have long been that physical science is possible because God created us in His image, creating our intellects in such a way as to be able to grasp, with some effort, the fundamental physical workings of His Creation. This is aligned with a school of thought known as presuppositional apologetics, which sees God’s existence is a first premise. If the first premise is false, then not just physical science but technology (which relies on physics at every juncture) is inexplicable.

That’s a Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge). Secular epistemologies tend to begin with sense experience. They’ve had to struggle mightily to stave off skepticism. It’s a long story.

In any case, learning the truth can be very difficult, made worse if your efforts are confounded with conflicting messages and narratives, some absurd and introduced on purpose to throw you off track and possibly even make you slightly crazy. Flat-earthism tells me there is an element out there that’s gotten progressively crazier.

Cass Sunstein: Architect of Cognitive Infiltration. The “Crisis Actors” Con.

Ron Unz draws our attention to a federal operative whose efforts overlapped the Bush and Obama years: Cass Sunstein, author of books on various subjects — and of an article published in an obscure academic journal back in 2008 suggesting that “conspiracy theories” should be fought not directly but through the infiltration method, which tries to drive people away from them by making them look ridiculous.

What he advocated, and what may have already been underway: superelite infiltrators enter the conspiracy fray with outlandish theories to compete with those of serious researchers. Then, over time, they ratchet up the outlandishness.

Sadly, the superelite mindset gets a few things right. The masses are by nature followers. In a society the educational system of which has basically gone off the rails, and in a culture driven by constant titillation and excitement, it will be easy to lead a lot of people by their noses. Especially those encouraged, or who have encouraged each other, to see and believe they’ve been manipulated by hidden, malevolent forces disrupting their lives and livelihoods.

Piper suggested that Sandy Hook was the Sunstein strategy’s first major test. Unz quotes him:

The Sandy Hook affair was tailor-made for putting the Sunstein gang’s experiment in motion. It involved violence. It involved the explosive issue of gun control, inasmuch as the incident was said to have been a mass shooting. And it was another sensational school shooting — and one at a grade school, no less.

The dynamics were absolutely on target — no pun intended — for the Sunstein thesis to be put to the test.

And, quite predictably, the mass media — as a consequence of its typically reckless nature — played right into the scheme. The frenzied rush in the heat of the moment to get “the scoop” led to sloppy reporting and presumably otherwise honest mistakes by journalists.

And naturally, a lot of these errors were quickly the subject of discussion among emailers and those participating on Internet discussion forums who were concerned about the obvious push for further gun control that was accompanying the media reportage relating to the events at Sandy Hook.

At this point Ron Unz interjects:

Piper argued that a small group of establishment operatives successfully manipulated the conspiracy community on the Internet, promoting ideas that soon captured the imagination of these activists, many of whom were excitable and overly gullible:

Piper again:

One of the first and most outrageous of these Internet “revelations” that did so much to make sincere truth seekers look foolish was the oft-repeated theme that “Sandy Hook was a hoax” and that no children were even killed there…. Even the introduction of the word “hoax” was carefully calculated and with the mass media reporting that “conspiracy theorists” were using that term to describe the tragedy, many in the general public began to doubt the sanity of a lot of good people who were rightfully raising questions about what happened at Sandy Hook and the way that it was being exploited…

This was their first big “test tube” case and it was proving to be a success, perhaps beyond even their wildest dreams….

The Crisis Management Conspirators mesmerized and manipulated American patriots and other skeptics via a nonstop wave of Sandy Hook “factoids” that quickly spread like wildfire across the Internet. And patriot websites by the hundreds — by the thousands — were picking them up and reporting them. These legends — spawned by the Crisis Management folks — because the staple daily diet of email addicts who were eagerly helping distribute the latest Sandy Hook “revelations”….

Precisely because so much disinformation was being repeated by well-meaning and entirely innocent folks, a lot of good patriots concluded that something had to be amiss with the “official” Sandy Hook story or otherwise — they said — so many good patriots on so many websites and elsewhere wouldn’t be raising these questions.

As the saying goes (I’ve quoted it before), what tangled webs we weave….

The idea is that if you can’t defeat your opponent in open debate, furtively join them and sabotage them from within! It’s a species of fifth generation warfare, fought with misdirection and subterfuge.

I think this explains the false rabbit trails I’ve mentioned and probably others besides. At least we should think about it. Continuing:

[O]ne of the biggest cons of all perpetrated upon legitimate truth seekers was the legend of the “crisis actors” … that came to be an article of faith surrounding Sandy Hook…. As we’ve already noted (perhaps all too often) in the wake of Sandy Hook many people actually believed that there hadn’t even been any gunplay at all — that no children and no adults were shot that day, that it was all a big staged event, with the purported victims and their families (along with law enforcement) in on the deal…. And in many respects, it may have been one of the most ingenious scams ever pawned off on American patriots designed to misdirect their attention.

Notice how specific superelites can be credited with “anticipating” the coming of Captain Covid. The obvious example is Event 201, organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, carried out at John Hopkins University on October 18, 2019. Another of those events that happened “in view,” i.e., not exactly hidden but not reported in corporate media. You had to seek it out, or you’d not know about it.

We find nothing of the sort with “crisis actors.” To the best of my knowledge no one has claimed credit for the idea. Someone will point out that we have seen ads for crisis actors. Yes, ads that could easily have been placed by agents of Piper’s/Unz’s Crisis Management Conspirators where patriots would see them.

If this line of reasoning is correct, it seems that Alex Jones — among those others we mentioned, and more besides — fell right into the trap the Sunstein crowd laid for them, and are paying the price.

What Might Have Happened at Sandy Hook.

Are there legitimate questions about Sandy Hook? Probably. But which of the following is more logical:

A subgroup within the superelite plan a hoaxed “mass shooting.” They recruit dozens of “crisis actors” to pretend to be parents of murdered children. They enlist local law enforcement as well as local media.

Now consider an alternative scenario … the elites just send in a trusted, trained professional killer, a bona fide psychopath, who possibly uses the Lanza kid as a patsy (akin to Oswald and JFK, or Sirhan and RFK). He does a job about which most of the after-the-fact reportage was essentially correct: twenty children and six teachers or administrators were shot to death by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

We have a timeline indicating that the shooter got off a rough average of one shot every 13.8 seconds — do the math. Some shots were reportedly much closer together, meaning much less time between them. I know of no information on how many shots missed, the bullets lodged in walls, but that would reduce the average time between shots still more.

The former would have been a massive undertaking! Agents of the superelite would have to buy the silence of each one of the dozens of people “in the know,” or otherwise threaten them, and manage to fool hundreds of other local people, continuing the masquerade indefinitely. There would always be the risk of someone credible blowing the whistle.

An advantage of the latter scenario is that it could have been accomplished without involving anyone outside a tiny inner circle. It accuses no one of being a “crisis actor.” Parents, police, the media, etc., could have been kept in the dark. What happened to the real shooter? Some reports indicated a “second shooter” initially apprehended outside the school moments later. This person seems to have disappeared. Or the real shooter, having left his weapon(s) with the Lanza kid (who received the final bullet), could have found a place to quickly change clothes, then pose as a parent and simply walk out with everyone else exiting the building in a state of panic.

I can’t prove that this second scenario is what happened, of course. I wasn’t there, and I doubt you were either, gentle reader. But consider the old and venerable principle known as Occam’s Razor. Roughly stated, other things being equal: given two competing ideas or explanations for the same event, the one with the fewest moving parts or basic postulates — structurally the simplest — tends to be the right one.

This idea has worked time and time again.

(In a universe designed by a rational God, a cosmos in which the deepest truths are ultimately the simplest makes sense, does it not?)

What Really Matters: the Superelite and Their Goal of Global De Facto Totalitarianism.

My thesis has long been, and continues to be: a small group of humanity, fundamentally sociopathic and seeing themselves as most fit to rule, is obsessed with power and global domination. This group has been using financial systems, economies, and over the past two and a half years, the psychology of mass hysteria, to extend their control over the world. They want a world government that will further enrich their global corporations, while exercising de facto totalitarian control over populations. This group recruits other sociopaths out of general populations who show a willingness and readiness to kill for the cause. They now have the technology enabling them to shift this scheme into high gear, and are using it!

The evidence for this is literally overwhelming!

The superelite, or GloboCorp, will stop at nothing to get what they want. Constitutional patriots in the U.S., as well as nationalists and so-called populists in Europe and elsewhere — also Christians the world over — continue to stand in their way.

They suffered a setback when the Internet got away from them. They partly lost control of national and international narratives, and since 2016 have pulled out all stops to get their power back. They see figures like Trump and possibly Putin as existential threats to their plans for the world. These figures don’t do their bidding as did the Clinton’s and Biden. They can’t be controlled. And they’ve proven strong enough to stand up against the superelite while leading populations at the national level. Hence controlled corporate media demonizes them as “fascists” and “autocrats.” Hence also the campaigns of censorship by Corporate Media and Big Tech which began after Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

The superelite know they are running out of time, because of the number of people out here who know about them and are organizing to oppose them, or at least get free of them.

Hence, finally, the frantic effort to block a second Trump presidency, which would be a catastrophe … for them!

Conclusion.

These are the sorts of things that merit our focus. We should avoid going down false rabbit trails, often based on incidents like Sandy Hook that go off the beaten track. Alex Jones’s fate shows what can happen when both prominent voices and their followers fall victim to cognitive infiltration.

Imagine the pain felt by parents who really did lose children in a mass shooting that, yes, really did happen even if by some chance Adam Lanza wasn’t the shooter! How would you cope, when you were accused in public of being a “crisis actor”? What would you do?

The situation is worse. For the past several weeks I’ve not seen a single reference to Jones that did not demonize him with the conspiracy theorist label. Some authors go further, denouncing him as a liar, despicable, malicious, and so on. In the wake of Jones’s likely financial ruin, millions of people watching it all will conclude that pursuit of anything smacking of “conspiracy theory” is not just nutty but evidence of personal malice! They will avoid it like the plague, and thus never see what is really going on in the world.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.

These columns present a perspective unavailable elsewhere: of personal freedom and community autonomy, based on a philosophically-informed conservatism within a Christian worldview holding that in the last analysis, we all answer to our Creator.

This stands opposed to the major threat of our time: a sociopathic superelite using technology and financialization to gain world domination, unleashed by secular materialism and the latter’s having collapsed all forms of valuation other than money and power. Globalists see themselves as answering only to each other. They do not believe in a Higher Power. They are the culmination of the materialist / secularist / liberal worldview.

My perspective incorporates accounts of how emergencies of various sorts arise or are manufactured, how controlled media hysterics generate fear in populations, and how these enable controlled governments to grab power and do the superelites’ bidding. Hegelian dialectic: crisis, reaction, response. Foment a crisis or through inaction allow it to develop; the crisis leads to a predictable reaction within populations (“Do something!”); those with power move in with the response they had planned all along.

These ideas are dispensed essentially for free. The editor of this site cannot afford to pay writers such as myself. Nor am I on the payroll of a “think tank” or some other such entity. No university or corporate leviathan has my back. I receive no grants. I am an Independent. We live in a foreign country, because of the lower cost of living. My wife and I survive on what remains of an inheritance, my monthly social security deposit into my U.S. bank account, the occasional donation, “gigs” and “odd jobs” that come our way, and Patreon.com.

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