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Comment by tsol | Hacker News Reader

Many many people take Alex Jones very seriously

Alex Jones actually is a very serious performance artist who never breaks kayfabe, like that one old magician that Christian Bale's character in the Prestige respected for perpetually keeping up his act while in public. There is a lot of overlap with what Jones is doing and something like professional wrestling.

I don't much care for his style, but I think one day, maybe long after his death, people will give Jones the respect he deserves as an artist. A well-flowing rant is not an easy thing to improvise, and he is just a machine for generating them. To paraphrase a quote about jazz, you don't just wake up one morning, pick up a microphone and start raving about the new world order.

There is a real art to conspiracy theorizing. You can't just make things up. You have to take random true things and stitch them together into sort of framework that's wild and entertaining enough for your audience while still seeming plausible. You have to shade them in with sinister undertones. It's a sort of dark impressionism.

He is his own brand of genius.

A lot of what you say, I read it and say it's actually very consistent with him believing it.

People who suffer delusions often aren't stupid or even unconvincing. A lot of that intellectual effort you're describing, piecing together plausible details to justify their falsehood, can go into it. Someone I know who suffers these issues had a reputation in the family for being creative, a good storyteller... The hospitalizations and psychiatric diagnoses came later.

I remember seeing some of his earlier stuff before the modern info wars and its not exactly laid back but the production value was more of a radio show. Most people don't know but he played a raving conspiracist in A Scanner Darkly, but he basically became that charter on Info Wars. With some of the info from his ex-wife's interview, I think his public persona slowly started to take over his real identity as it grew.

And waking life, phenomenal film

Alex Jones was right about Jeffrey Epstein, the jet, the island, and all the child abuse that has happened there.

Yet he is wrong about nearly everything else.

If you want a deep dive on Alex Jones and all his lies and schemes, the podcast Knowledge Fight has been documenting InfoWars for years.

He was right about Bohemian Grove in the 1990s. He gets some things right, and some things wrong. He’s about as right as most media organizations.

"He’s about as right as most media organizations."

Is this true? Do you have any analysis to back this up, or is it just something you made up because it makes you feel good?

This is a great point -- where can we find some INDEPENDENT FACT CHECKERS that happen to have the same political bias as me to dispute the above? I'm extremely uncomfortable that people have different opinions here.

Jones is a well documented liar and grifter. This is not a difference of opinion.

As someone who lived directly across the river from the Bohemian Grove for about a decade, I can tell you with certainty that the only thing he was right about is that it exists and its members are wealthy. There's nothing secret about the existence or timing of the gatherings, as they're discussed in the local paper. Jobs are advertised for caterers and cleanup crews. The people hired always return, just like any other summer camp type job.

A broken clock is right twice a day. And it's not like Epstein was some unknown figure before the Miami Herald reported on him, there were public 2008 articles about his jail time, which also mentioned his public figure ties[0].

0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/02/usa.internatio...

He is 'right' about a lot of things, but what he does is take one tiny nugget of somewhat real information and then build on it and spin it in any way he wants.

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