The Alex Jones mirror-world

To expand from a brief post on this subject yesterday, you have probably encountered—at one time or another—Alex Jones and his youthful British protégé Paul Joseph Watson. The two men are alternately considered risible or terrifying by consensus progressive opinion. If their images do not appear in the Wikipedia entry for “conspiracy theory” I would be very much surprised; both men pretty much own the territory and have done so for about twenty years.

Just what a “conspiracy theorist” is exactly is a touchy subject; and there will be many who will be quick to remind me that the term was supposedly invented by the CIA to discredit their opponents. Whether that is true or not, I still think it is a useful term; and I use it in a basically non-pejorative sense. To actually describe the thought pattern that goes along with conspiracy theories is a tricky business—what makes a theory conspiratorial, anyway? Although this is difficult to pin down, I think we all intuitively know that there is a recognisable thought style that goes along with conspiracy theories—as with pornography it is hard to pin down exactly, but you know it when you see it.

Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists use a particular logic to reach their conclusions and that is what gives their ideas a particular flavour; and at least one book, a rather recondite though accessible book, has been published that identifies the logic conspiracy theories tend to deploy—what we recognise in a conspiracy theory, as with all man’s ideas, is a particular logic at work. In brief, conspiracy theories are beliefs, but they are beliefs that are not wholly believed by the person who holds them—these are a special sub-type belief, if you will. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” The full answer, never expressed, is something like: “I believe it, but not fully”—and this is connected to the way conspiracy theories are often shorthands or metaphors to explain wider social issues in vivid terms (e.g. the view that 9/11 was an inside job expresses the true view that the American government lies all the time—for example, about WMDs in Iraq).

The general line taken by Watson and Jones runs something like this: elite groups—specific families, such as the Rockefellers, the British Royal Family, and bankers in general—secretly control the world and do so with collusion from the CIA, MI6, the private foundations, and elite secret societies; their goal is to achieve a world government and eventually—through communion with demonic forces—technological ascension to another dimension. This cabal may possibly be reptilian inter-dimensional creatures that feast on human blood; and, further, they were behind the Nazis—and, therefore, their plans for us involve eugenics and forced depopulation, along with various weird science projects that range from peculiar vaccines to experiments on frogs. To achieve this they will destroy democracy, and along with it America as created by the Founding Fathers.

The view represents an attempt by people who are literally uneducated and not capable of a high level of abstraction to explain the world they live in; and I mean education in its true sense here, not in the sense that the “educated” are indoctrinated into progressive opinion. Watson, for example, dropped out from school very early and has basically always worked for the Jones project. Jones and Watson are people who derived their value system from the telly; the telly, being controlled by our hegemonic progressive value system, tells you that “Nazism”, eugenics, rich people, and elitism represent absolute moral evil—and democracy an absolute good. Watson and Jones lack the higher-order thought that would allow them to see how this value system came about.

Jones and Watson are both aware at a common sense level that the system they live under is anti-white, anti-masculinity, and anti-nature—anti-them. However, the only moral system they know by which to object to this situation is the one they got off the telly. Bad things are happening, malevolent ideas are directed at men like them and their families—who could be behind it? The Nazis, of course—and the aristocrats, and the elitists, and the rich! Everyone knows these are evil people; the telly said so—it was in all my cartoons as I grew up (they cannot abstract to this level and so do not know this about themselves; they cannot interrogate their own values or how their values came about).

Really, Jones and Watson represent a very extreme and uneducated version of “Democrats are the real racists.” Their view that the world is run by elite families—this is often regarded as a conspiratorial view—represents how literal people with little ability to abstract understand the world; paradoxically, their literalness creates a metaphorical truth; and since there is some relation to reality in what they say, Watson and Jones are often uncannily right—and yet their view is too literal and pat. It is a worldview where a “Rothschild agenda” or similar unfolds on schedule and with perfect concord between the powerful.

As a way to explain social relations, the Watson and Jones view is more sensible and true than anything an academic sociologist could come up with—academic sociologists are blinded by their strictly policed progressive belief system. Watson and Jones take the common sense view that the world must run like an office: there are people in charge and these people meet secretly at various clubs—golf clubs or Bohemian Grove—and decide what happens next. Everyone on the factory floor knows that the big shots are up to something together. Actually, the world does work through patronage networks to a very great degree and so Watson and Jones are closer to the mark in their explanations as to how the world works than the sociologist with his jargon about white supremacy or performative heteronormative roles in the workplace.

However, the error made by Jones and Watson is to assume that there is a secret central committee somewhere—at Davos, or perhaps Bohemian Grove; an early Jones stunt was to infiltrate the latter, a private club near San Francisco—where the whole plan is worked out and unfolds from. If only this were so, if there was a secret central committee somewhere with a few people in charge—even if their intentions were evil—this would be a huge improvement over our current system; some responsibility, even malevolent responsibility (if there is such a thing), would be a great improvement on minimal or no responsibility. In the current system, there is no one person or committee in charge; there are different fiefdoms and bureaucratic bailiwicks that sometimes clash with each other and sometimes ignore each other—and rarely do what the organisation was intended to do when first initiated.

It is true, for example, that large foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, often come up with perverse ideas; but this is just because foundations, without any market discipline and with their founders long dead, tend to become irresponsible and so pursue perverse objectives to aggrandise their administrators. There is no plan to make them so; it just happens. In a similar way, trust-funders often end up involved in bizarre political causes or perverse activities—often reasonably describable as Satanic. But this is not because they are inducted into depravity at Harvard’s Skull and Bones society, not as such; it is just that if you are given a load of cash at twenty-one or so then the temptation to be irresponsible with it is very high—your behaviour is not constrained by reality. I would add, in addition, that not everyone who is born rich is automatically corrupted and irresponsible—just there is a general tendency for them to be so, due to the incentives presented to them.

Jones and Watson might be relatively to the right, being populists, but they are still demagogues—they write off “the rich”, “the bankers”, and “the elite families” as quickly as any socialist. In a sense, a populist is just an unauthorised or unlicensed demagogue; the sociology professor is a licensed demagogue. Of course, populist rhetoric does not use an explanatory framework that rests on high-status Marxisant ideas, yet it still amounts to a complaint that anyone who is rich is illegitimately rich—and that needs to be rectified, probably by redistribution.

The quasi-Marxist rhetoric is for the upper-middle-class striver who wants to topple the upper classes, and it has been blessed by the academy and features long words; the rhetoric provided by Watson and Jones is aimed at the middle-class and lower-middle-class striver who wants to topple the upper-middle-class striver—probably someone who has not been to university and resents people who have done so. As with all demagogues, Watson and Jones exist to encourage these persons to be resentful and envious—“Think you’re so clever with your degrees.” The official media quickly identifies this trait in Watson and Jones, although they neglect to notice it in themselves—they are engaged in urgent social criticism, of course.

Watson and Jones are correct to note that slogans, such as “Build Back Better”, appear in unison across the Western world. Aha! The secret eugenic central committee that wants to depopulate the world via vaccines caught out again! The reality is that the Western world, being effectively the American empire, exists under a unified value system—just as did the Eastern Bloc. Patronage networks across many industries overlap and intersect and everyone with any influence, in public anyway, affirms to some degree ideas that are broadly called progressive; many, as with Watson and Jones, do not even understand that there are alternatives. The hegemonic Western belief system is not overtly centralised, as in the Soviet system where there was a central institute for Marxism-Leninism—although the same role is de facto played by Harvard, as the premier theological college in the American empire; theology in its broad sense here.

Consequently, beliefs and updates to the hegemonic belief system do fold out in a uniform way: various patronage networks “get the message” from those people more concerned with belief regulation. Man is a highly socially conscious animal; people who want to get ahead are anxious not to seem socially deviant. At school I was told to read an “educated and respectable newspaper”, such as The Times, and in the same way executives follow The New York Times editorial line; it is not that a secret society emails them what they should say—they naturally understand what educated people should think and say, then parrot it. Anyone in a senior position is, by default, there to “get on”; they never rose up the ranks by contradicting every statement most people take to be respectable. It is in this way that slogans like “Build Back Better” spread, social osmosis—a reputable think thank coins the slogan, journalists interview them, and within a few days everyone talks about it; within a week it is adopted policy.

Further, since progressivism grew from Protestant Christianity, a system where entrepreneurial preachers—rather like Alex Jones—compete against each other for congregations, the belief system has an inherent dynamic aspect to it; it is not as tightly corralled as, say, Roman Catholicism. Political entrepreneurs do crop up to disrupt the market with new iterations on the belief, often to boost their own position within the elite. Hence there is a market to find new racist objects or activities; a political entrepreneur might make out, for example, that yoga pants or hiking are too white and so build a whole career on this issue, leveraging their boutique progressive values to trip up other elite groups who have failed to catch up. If such an entrepreneur achieves success, there will be a critical mass moment where the entire elite group decides, for example, that racist yoga pants are an important issue—nobody wants to get caught out and left behind; if you demur or say the issue is unimportant you are “racist”, an unsophisticated out-group member. The people who, so to speak, run the world are no more or less human when it comes to popularity and conformism—perhaps more so, especially politicians.

This is how, in part, views that the masses find abhorrent or peculiar—such as the current Western fascination with transsexualism—come about. For men like Jones and Watson, the explanation is a conscious plot by demonic people towards some final end, definitely a sinister end—why else would “they” suddenly start to propagate such crazy ideas? Satan. Messages from inter-dimensional beings. While I am actually open to such notions, the above process is more or less how ideas like transsexualism or the supposed crisis over people touching black women’s hair come about—it is not so much the idea that inter-dimensional beings are a problem that troubles, as much as it is the notion that these beings are in charge in a straightforward way. Again, no one is in charge; or perhaps the de facto “pope of progressivism”, probably buried in some university bureaucracy, is weak and rarely puts his foot down—so what we have is a whirl of fashionable ideas, with influential people trying to keep up (and trip others up) over what values are currently cool.

As with many people, Jones and Watson overestimate how clever man is as a species and how little can be achieved through conscious control. Their model is literal; perhaps an office where they worked in which the senior staff would go to lunch together and did, in fact, plan everything out. Watson and Jones take that model—still better than what most sociologists say—and apply it to the planet. Yet at a certain level, probably not very far beyond ten people, it becomes much more complex than that—with much human behaviour accounted for by mirroring of fellows or wider structural incentives.

Take Trump’s presidency: the American state and media basically colluded against him to make him impotent in office, but not because some mastermind phoned up every important person in the state and media; no, mostly it was because what amounts to the “deep state” autonomously worked out that Trump was not in their particular interests and did not share their beliefs and so stopped cooperation at their locality—the cumulative effect looks like a centrally organised conspiracy, it is emergent behaviour in other words.

Now, there were consciously organised conspiracies against Trump as well, probably through various patronage networks. However, the conspiracy theorist mindset only accepts consciously controlled conspiracies—it has no emergent aspect. This is how it can quickly come to assume, for example, that Trump was himself an agent of the conspiracy—“they” put him in office to draw away anti-government energy and as a distraction. In the conspiratorial mindset, everything is centrally and consciously controlled by “them”; and this is what causes the supposedly sophisticated left to laugh at conspiracy theorists.

Yet there is emergent behaviour that mirrors conscious planning, there are patronage networks that respond rationally to protect their self-interests, and there are also consciously arranged conspiracies that run through those networks. It is just that conspiracy theorists overestimate their enemies—overestimate the human capacity for conscious centralised control, whereas people who discount all conspiracies underestimate the degree to which people will spontaneously covertly collaborate to protect their interests; and also the fact that there are organised conspiracies.

Ironically, Jones and Watson are colonised by elite ideas from long ago; partly they patch these together to oppose progressivism. This explains why, as with Lyndon LaRouche, they take a particularly hostile attitude towards the British Royal Family—a group surely no more influential than Hollywood celebrities, and certainly far less important than anyone in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. The interest comes about because for Jones the British are the traditional enemies of America; if America is in crisis who is likely to be behind it? The British, of course—they were always the *real* enemy. Similarly, the Vatican always crops up in these conspiracies, since long ago Catholic influence in America was a grave concern for people who mattered—as much as the fate of transsexuals concerns today’s elites. Now the Brits have teamed up with America’s other foes—the Vatican, a centralised tyranny similar to the British monarchy—and the bankers to enslave America under a monarchical tyranny again (although they will deny this to the hilt, when people say *bankers* they mean the Jews; another antique 19th-century elite concern as regards immigration to America).

In order to square the above with the progressive worldview they imbibed from the telly when young, Watson and Jones strictly insist that this elite conspiracy funded and supported the National Socialists; and sometimes people in their circle, such as David Icke, suggest that the elites are not human but rather inter-dimensional lizards. It is somewhat unclear if this is rhetorical exaggeration, although people like Icke take it literally—metaphorically it is, of course, perfectly true that politicians are blood-sucking lizards.

The lizards, inter-dimensional beings, and demons are important because at a certain level Watson and Jones are aware that what they say could be construed as racially charged; yet if they jump back to “the lizards did it” or “the inter-dimensional demonic entities did it” then they can find a safe position within the progressive values they grew up in and partially accept; further, these beings supposedly actually funded Hitler—so we are obviously not Nazis; we oppose the people who funded Hitler. This is another defence, since Watson and Jones otherwise put forward ideas—return to nature, suspicion as regards technology, natural nutrition, traditional social values, nativism, hostility to bankers (Jews), non-specific mystical beliefs, and Gnosticism—that could easily associate them with National Socialism. We return to the conspiracy theory as a belief that a person half-believes; it is half-believed because it is the only way to elaborate views that are socially unacceptable, even though everyone knows what you mean really.

The fully completed circuit as regards this thought—your mind has completed it, even unconsciously—is that the Jews are so diabolical that they funded Hitler into power to persecute themselves to get sympathy from other people. This is why, despite the exoteric message as regards inter-dimensional entities, Jones and Watson evoke such a strong critical response from the official system—everyone unconsciously completes that mental circuit, even though the direct accusation cannot be said because it is presented in an indirect and somewhat ludicrous way. The fully elaborated version would say that it was “particular Jews”—some sect within Judaism—who did it, not all Jews; but that is just because a committed person with anti-Jewish views knows that rhetorically it is too strong to say to someone, “It’s all of them.” Humans just do not believe statements like that about entire groups, so a plausible presentation has to be found whereby only, as it happens, most, though not all, people within the group are responsible—progressivism itself holds out that there are “white allies”, for example; although functionally it is against all white people.

Jones and Watson obsess over the supposed desire by elites to implement eugenics and depopulation because, at heart, they agree with both; they want to go back to nature and let everything sort itself out—they would also like to live in an aristocratic and authoritarian society. However, they are so contorted by first-layer progressive programming that they project these desires onto their enemies; in actuality, Western governments really are democratic, anti-eugenics, and pursue dysgenic policies—we are nowhere near a clandestine project to create the superman and depopulate the Earth.

This is why I say Jones and Watson live in a mirror-world, the message they would prefer to promote is imputed to their enemies. Similarly, I think that the obsession with lizard-people is also projection; the Scythians, ancient Indo-Aryans, were known as “the dragon people” and if anyone is lizard-like—cold, calculating, war-like, and vicious—it is the Europeans; the Jews are warm people, not cold-blooded killer lizards. So I think that at some repressed esoteric level Watson and Jones know that they are the lizards people, heirs to the Scythians; but as with their views on eugenics they project this reality onto their opponents.

Jones is really an independent Christian preacher, although he originally billed himself as an investigative journalist. He delivers extraordinary sermons—filled with fire and brimstone—that amount to a commonly felt rage against life in an industrial society where everyone, particularly men, is in someway neutered or brainwashed. As such, Jones belongs to the very tradition—entrepreneurial Christian preaching—that spawned progressivism; he has his own sect, a more conservative sect but one that works in the tradition nonetheless; hence, as with the mainline progressives, he dislikes the rich—he is a demagogue, just not an approved demagogue. He still plays the democratic game, the democratic game aims to whip up envy against other people so the state will confiscate their belongings.

Hence conspiracy theorists tend to overestimate money and underestimate status—the two are connected, but at a certain level detach; boutique values become more important than money. As lower-class populists whose audience is lower class, Jones and Watson think everything is about money and, possibly, power—although never the actual competition over boutique values that exists. Money is relatable to them and their audience—power too—yet as people who define themselves as anti-snobs competition over values is incomprehensible to them; even though they do it, as all humans do, at their level. This is why, in their view, the Rothschilds or Vanderbilts must be important; they have money—and yet, functionally, these families probably long since ceased to be important status creators and have relatively little power; even if they still have enough residual clout to go to the right parties.

Although not self-described as such, Jones is a Gnostic; he calls his website Prison Planet—this encapsulates the Gnostic idea that material reality is a prison from which we must escape, particularly, as Jones suggests, with a return to a generalised spirituality. In line with our feminised world, Jones wants to escape back to nature (Mother Nature); as with more leftist Gnostics, such as Graham Hancock, he sees technological society as the problem—hence his suspicion that the elites have communed with demons to attain the technology we already have and that greater technological development will chain us further. Again, Jones is still dominated by progressive ideas—actually environmentalism, albeit in an idiosyncratic form—that he has picked up from the general culture. Although he would despise Extinction Rebellion as tools of the elite, his own views are pretty much identical—only the gloss is different.

So Jones and Watson represent what happens when ordinary men want to object to a corrupt system but lack the abstraction level to understand what has happened and so have to use the concepts provided by their enemies to make their protest; they end up engaged in massive psychological projection. What they really want to say is something like: we need to depopulate the planet, improve our genetic stock, eat natural foods, contact supernatural entities, and be governed by a highly competent quasi-aristocratic elite that conforms to natural values. Unfortunately, they are so literal and captured by homespun adaptations they have made to the dominant belief system that it is difficult for them to conceive that it is possible to demand such a situation; and so they are doomed to live in a mirror-world, engaged in a fight with illusions.