Profit of Doom

If there is one person poised to make a killing in the 9-11 Denial market, it is Alex Jones. Jones has done a spectacular job of turning one lucky prediction (and ignoring dozens of unlucky ones) into a lifetime career at the top of the multilevel marketing pyramid that is 9-11 Truth.



Jones became famous for his "prediction of 9-11" in July of 2001:



It looks like he did call Bin Laden for a terrorist strike, although he gets no points for the WTC mention because it is in the context of past events (i.e., he is referring to the 1993 WTC bombing).

Update: Perry Logan points out in the comments that Jones did not actually predict an attack; what he did was tell his minions to call the White House and warn them that if there was an attack they knew it wasn't really Osama Bin Laden. This is kind of a "free pass" for Jones because if there is no attack, he can claim his supporters called the White House in sufficient numbers to alert them that they would not get away with it, and if there is an attack, he can claim to have "predicted" it. So, no, Jones did not make a psychic prediction.

Jones is a shrewd self-promoter who is one of the few people to stay atop the 9-11 tiger for years without getting mauled. He has the most influential radio program in the 9-11 Denial movement and more important, he has access to TV and radio hosts upstream who will let him on with a "breaking" news story, like Matt Lepacek's arrest a couple weeks ago, which got him on Coast to Coast AM.

He consolidated his hold on the upper reaches of the movement by bankrolling the Final Maybe Rough Cut of Loose Change, and absorbing We Are Change into his empire. The latter has already paid dividends, but Alex griped about keeping the Looser crew afloat a couple days ago and asked for contributions. The fact that they tried to flog that pathetic story about Barry Jennings as some revelation certainly indicates that the Loosers don't have anything new and breaking in their film.

Jones' worldview is paranoid in the extreme. I have not listened to enough of his shows to get a firm view, but he seems to be manic/depressive. Periodically he will ride the high wave but inevitably he will crash into the slough of despond. As with many Truthers, he believes ridiculous stuff without batting an eyelash while professing himself a "skeptic" of the official story.

Jones is avidly anti-illegal immigrant; it is one of his few mainstream stances. In a startling anecdote from his June 19, 2007 show, he claims that his antipathy to illegals stems from an incident when he was 17 and four Mexicans broke his leg in a fight (44:34):

"I mean I was brought up, my parents taught me about history and everything, but I wasn't brought up to dislike any other group, so it wasn't until years later that I realized that when--I say five, it was really four Mexicans, one of them stood by--broke my leg, that was a racial attack, but do I blame all Mexicans because, for no reason, four Mexicans attacked me when I was 16 years old and broke my leg? Yeah, I beat up about three of them and then they finally all jumped and tackled me and just with boots on purpose, knew how to fight, broke my leg, on purpose and then kicked me in the face and laughed at me...."

Jones also makes wild claims about how illegal aliens are planning to kill us all (40:05):

"The US is under military attack. The illegal aliens that are in this nation many of them see themselves as fighters. They openly write about it. And they have been told that when the word comes down that they are to set fire to every major US city."

Because, you see, the Islamists don't want to kill us all, the Mexicans do!

Alex does his best to let us know how bad the illegal aliens are:

"Don't think that for a moment that--Chinese, here they've got over 5000 front companies that are PLA, don't think for a minute that there aren't thousands of Russian commandos here in the US at any one time, and folks, the point is they can use them and they probably are. The New World Order is going to destroy this country one way or the other, and I know you're thinking oh, it can't happen here; it is happening here. But the greatest threat is these illegal aliens, folks. They cannot wait to burn this country down. Mmmmkay?"

Okay, thousands of front companies owned by the Chicoms, thousands of Roosky Rambos and you want us to focus on the guys with the leaf-blowers? Mmmmkay.