Let’s take a ride down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, shall we? Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings when an InfoWars stooge crashed several law enforcement press conferences, I was speaking with The Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen about Alex Jones. We were joking about circulating a rumor that Jones was actually a government covert operative manufactured and trained to infiltrate the fringe conspiracy theory groups on the far-right.
Ben and I speculated that perhaps the government had instructed “Special Agent Jones” to invent a roster of crazy over-the-top theories meant to deliberately distract conspiracy theorists from real-life conspiracies. You know the list. FEMA is constructing concentration camps; juice boxes are stripping men of their testosterone in order to produce more gay people; the moon landing was faked; Obama is an al-Qaida operative, all of it delivered in the form of googly-eyed, self-satirical performance art that includes Joker make-up and throat-chafing rants about 1776 rising again — the wet fever-dreams of paranoid schizophrenics, thus distracting them from other, more heinous government black-ops because, you know, they were getting too close to the truth.
In other words, Jones himself is a false flag.
Of course we’d never seriously consider engaging in this kind of deception, especially while trying to build a legitimate reputation and readership for The Daily Banter. But, nevertheless, just as a mischievous way to troll the InfoWars people who were spamming me on Twitter after I wrote an article about Dan Bidondi and the Boston Marathon conspiracy theories, I tweeted an obvious joke about how perhaps Alex Jones was a covert operative for the government. Cue dramatic fanfare. In response, Oliver Willis wrote to me and said that there’s an actual conspiracy theory along those lines.
Um. Wow.
After some digging around, I confirmed what Oliver told me: in the darkest, most delirious hyper-fringes of the internet, there are people who believe Alex Jones is a government operative. The reigning king of all conspiracy theorists is, himself, the subject of an anti-government conspiracy theory. [continue reading here]