According to this week’s Radio Times, the satellite/cable channel PBS America begins a new series this Friday, 25th September 2020, on conspiracy theories over on that side of the Atlantic. The programme’s entitled ‘United States of Conspiracy’, and begins with Alex Jones, the weird Texan internet radio and TV pundit. The piece about it by David Seale on page 106 of the RT reads
Contributing to this profile of the American broadcaster Alex Jones, British author Jon Ronson describes him as “the most… spiralling person I’ve ever met”.
Jones was a fringe figure until the confluence of 9/11 and the internet’s new power to build communities meant conspiracy theorists could band together and wield influence. Having turned fear and hatred into a lucrative commodity, Jones saw his tactic of repeatedly making wild statements with no supporting evidence enter the political mainstream.
Then in 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the US and things really got weird.
Ronson was the director and presenter of two documentary series on Channel 4 about conspiracy theories and secret American military projects to develop psychic powers, The Secret Rulers of the World and Crazy Rulers of the World. He also wrote two books to accompany his series, Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. This last was made into a film a few years ago with Euan McGregor. It took its name from an American psychic warfare experiment, in which American squaddies tried to kill goats using only the power of their minds. I have no idea if they were ever successful, and did anything more than puzzle the goats, who may well have wondered why these men were staring at them.
I might be wrong, but I think Jones made his first appearance on British TV with Jonson on Secret Rulers of the World. He and Ronson sneaked into Bohemian Grove, the location of an annual gathering of America’s elite men that’s been held since the 19th century. As it’s an all-male party, you probably won’t be surprised that there have been allegations of sexual assault and harassment by some of these immensely rich geezers against the serving staff. It’s supposed to be a chance for the superrich running the country to network and let off steam during the summer. The culmination of the event is a piece of playacting called ‘The Sacrifice of Dull Care’. Or something like that. This involves an effigy representing Dull Care being ritually killed or burnt or otherwise sacrificed. There’s a widespread conspiracy theory, not just confined to America, that the world is run by a small cabal of immensely wealthy Satanists. Jones and others like him believe that this playlet is really a Satanic ceremony involving human sacrifice. Ronson and Jones filmed the ceremony, and it looked to me very much like it was only a effigy that was being ritually killed. But it was small, about the size of a child, and so to Jones and the others it really was a child, that was sacrificed to Satan by the elite men secretly ruling America. Jones was shown broadcasting this on his show, and then ranting to the camera about how Americans would never be forelock-tugging serfs and give up their guns.
Jones does a lot of ranting. And making bizarre, obviously fake smears against largely left-wing politicos and ordinary people. In one of his shows, he claimed that NASA had a secret base on Mars run by child slave labour. Which they obviously don’t, but the agency nevertheless felt that they had to issue an official denial. He also claimed that Barack Obama was the antichrist, ’cause he’s supposed to have smelt and had flies about him. Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with one of her close political allies and is a witch practising black magic using human blood. She’s also either possessed by demons, or aliens, or is a robot from at least the waist down, because Jones reckons he saw something metal fall out of her trouser leg while she was out meeting the American public.
More seriously, Jones has made extremely dangerous, libelous claims that have caused innocent people great distress and nearly resulted in a shooting. He got sued a while ago by a Turkish businessman, who runs a yogurt factory in America. The man makes a point of employing immigrants and asylum seekers. The city where his business is located was hit by a series of rapes. Jones claimed they’d been committed by the Turkish bloke’s employees. They hadn’t, the man sued and won.
Then there was the Sandy Hook massacre, another school shooting. It’s a terrible tragedy, made worse by Jones’ paranoia. He’s convinced, or appears convinced, that such shootings are being deliberately staged to provide a pretext for the American government to pass legislation outlawing guns. From which the government will establish a dictatorship, forcing the American people into refugee and concentration camps. One of Jones’ nonsensical claims was that Barack Obama was going to declare a state of emergency and then have the American public rounded up into FEMA camps. Of course, no such thing has happened.
Jones claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting had similarly been staged, and that the parents shown grieving over the loss of their children were really ‘crisis actors’. It’s nonsense, and offensive nonsense, but that has stopped those who believe it pestering the parents to come clean and confess that it’s all fake.
And then there’s the incident when a gunman walked into a Boston pizza parlour looking for the kids that were allegedly being kept there ready to be abused by Democratic politicos. This was the rumour going round, according to which the abused kids were to be ordered up by their abusers with the pizza toppings used as a kind of code for what type of child the politicos wanted. In the meantime, the kids themselves were kept in an underground dungeon. A few years ago a bloke walked into the parlour off the street with a rifle demanding to be shown the dungeon so he could free the children. The parlour staff showed him that they didn’t have a dungeon, but only the cabinet where the business’ junction boxes were located, and a backroom which had their computer and lots of pizza boxes. All normal, no kids waiting for abuse. The gunman was satisfied with this, and gave himself up to the cops. It was a dangerous incident that very nearly could have ended in bloodshed. Even today, apparently, the parlour boss and his staff still get people demanding where they’re keeping the kids for abuse.
Jones has also appeared on British television. He turned up a little while ago on Andrew Neil’s show, where he started ranting about how Americans wouldn’t give up their guns, and 1776 would happen again if we tried to make them, before screaming nonsense like ‘metal shark!’ while the camera panned away to show Neil making the circling gesture around his temple with his finger showing precisely what he thought of Jones’ mental health.
No-one quite knows whether Jones believes the rubbish he spouts or not. Some people, who have met him personally say that behind the scenes he can be quite calm and rational. He has also formally deposed to the American courts that he doesn’t believe in what he broadcasts. His wife divorced him a few years ago, and sued for custody of their children. She was afraid for their mental health because Johnson’s TV studio was in their home. She was afraid that the children would come into it and hear all the terrifying, absurd gibberish that Jones and his guests and co-workers were broadcasting around America. Jones replied that he should retain custody of the kids, because he didn’t believe what he said. He was, he claimed, like a rodeo clown entertaining people.
I don’t know if Jones still is, but he was a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and several times had him as a guest on his show when he was campaigning for the presidency. It may therefore partly be thanks to the publicity Jones gave him that the Orange Generalissimo is in the White House.
Jones has more or less vanished from the airwaves in recent years. I think the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook took out a lawsuit against him, and as a result YouTube and other internet platforms decided he was too toxic and threw him off.
Jones is bizarre, and his antics entertaining if you’re not the one being libeled and smeared. But there’s a serious aspect to programmes like this, one which is not commented on by the mainstream media. There really are conspiracies and covert plots by the world’s governments, intelligence agencies and factions of businessmen. For example, there’s considerable evidence for the British state using loyalist paramilitaries to assassinate Republicans in Northern Ireland. One branch of the British secret services, the IRD, also forged material smearing Labour party politicos like Tony Benn as supporters of the IRA. Indeed, the entirely respectable academic historian Rory Cormac wrote a book about these very real conspiracies, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP 2018). But these aren’t covered when the media starts talking about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Historians and researchers like Lobster’s Robin Ramsay aren’t invited onto any programmes. Instead, you get people like David Aaronovich, who blithely informs us all that there are no secret government conspiracies to deceive us going on, and we should all carry on trusting our rulers and betters.
The PBS America programme looks interesting, and these bogus conspiracies are interesting and important. While they aren’t real, they have real power because of the sheer number of people, who believe in them.
But there are also very real plots and conspiracies, like that al-Jazeera UK uncovered with Shai Masot at the Israeli embassy colluding with senior British civil servants over who should be in the cabinet. And the smears by the Integrity Initiative against Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that he was a Communist secret agent or collaborator with Putin. It’s these conspiracies that really do need careful analysis, dissection and exposure.
But that is precisely what the establishment does not want. And so for the moment conspiracy theories, as far as mainstream broadcasting goes, means the bizarre fantasies of people like Alex Jones.
More sheer, howling madness from Alex Jones of Infowars, the man for whom the term ‘fake news’ could have been coined. As I’ve mentioned before, Jones is a notorious conspiracy theorist, who hosts his own internet TV show where he claims that the people of America and the world are under attack from their own governments, determined to impoverish and enslave them. Those responsible for this nefarious project are the ‘globalists’, by which he means the elite 1 per cent, the major industrialists, politicians and world leaders. According to him, they are determined to create something very much like the one-world Satanic superstate of Christian Fundamentalist end-times demonology. The leaders of this conspiracy are involved in every kind of depravity imaginable, including child sacrifice and paedophilia. He appeared on Jon Ronson’s Channel 4 documentary Them: Adventures with Extremists, where he and Ronson sneaked into the annual meeting of America’s political and business elites at Bohemian Grove in California. Witnessing a bizarre playlet in which the participants burn an effigy of ‘Dull Care’, Jones and his followers immediately decided that the figure was a child being ritually sacrificed to Satan.
Jone’s has said a number of times that he doesn’t know if the ultimate forces behind the conspiracy to enslave humanity are demons or malign, extradimensional aliens. But he believes they really exist, whatever they are. Thus he accused Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton of being demonically possessed, and that Clinton was a participant in Satanic rituals involving eating human blood and other body fluids. He also had to make an apology and a very public retraction on air after he claimed that there was a paedophile ring supplying children to Democratic party politicos operating out of a pizza parlour in Boston. Of course there wasn’t. But that didn’t stop someone with a gun going into the place looking for the underground basement where they kept the kids prisoner. Fortunately, the owners were able to show him that no such dungeon existed, and no-one was shot. But it could very easily have gone the other way.
He also had to retract similar allegations made against the Turkish owner of a yoghurt factory. This company had a policy of hiring immigrants, including those from the Middle East. So Jones alleged that the firm’s boss was another paedophile, and that workers from his company were responsible for a spate of rapes in the area. No, the boss wasn’t, and his workers weren’t either. And after the factory boss consulted m’learned friends, as Private Eye calls them, Jones had to appear on air to state that, once again, he’d made a mistake.
As a member of the American Right, he’s firmly against gun control. He’s also against fluoride in the water, and seems to believe that there is some kind of UN plan to have their doctors castrate the male population. Quite apart from putting chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay.
As well as enslaving us in refugee camps for the victims of natural disasters, Jones also believes, or claims to believe, that the globalists are trying to deprive us of our basic humanity. He denounced the gay rights movement as a ‘transhumanist space cult’ intending to create a genderless human being. Which really isn’t how the vast majority of gays and their supporters in their movement for equality see it at all. Away from sexual politics, Jones has frequently ranted about how the globalists plan to turn everyone into some kind of genetically engineered cyborg.
In this short clip, under a minute, Jones cries about how, when he was in Britain, he saw tanks full of babies and small children, who’ve been genetically engineered into fish people. They all had gills, and were swimming around, breathing under water.
I’ve put this up partly because it involves my home country, obviously. Jones has been to England. He appeared briefly on the Daily Politics with Andrew Neil, where he started yelling about the evils of gun control and how we would never crush good Americans and take their guns away. Or something like that. It ended with the camera pulling away from Jones to focus instead on Neil making the circular ‘nutter’ gesture by the side of his head.
I don’t know whether Jones has been to Blighty again or not. I’m absolutely sure, however, that he has not seen gilled, gene-engineered sprogs in tanks. I think there was a project to develop artificial gills in the 1907s – Duncan Lunan mentions it in his book, Man and the Planets – but that seems to have died the death of all scientific dead-ends. And a few years ago the BBC science documentary programme, Horizon, did cover experiments where animals were shown breathing in liquid. It wasn’t water, however. It was a special, oxygenated liquid, and the creatures didn’t have gills.
It also seems to me that he’s watched too much X-Files on DVD. The show’s central story arc was that there was a secret project to create human-alien hybrids in preparation for a final, alien invasion in which the normal human majority would be completely exterminated. The aliens and the hybrids were, of course, green blooded. As well as being extremely difficult to kill, the human-alien hybrids could also breathe under water. There’s a scene in one episode where Mulder and Scully look around a secret lab in an old warehouse, full of humans sleeping underwater in their tanks.
It’s a good question whether Jones actually believes any of the stuff he spouts. A few months ago his ex-wife sued for custody of their children. They were then living with Jones, who also his studio in his home. His former wife claimed that Jones was insane, and that watching their father rant about these bizarre and terrifying conspiracies, which existed only in his head, was damaging to their children’s mental health. Jones’ lawyer responded that he didn’t believe any of this nonsense, and that it was an act, or performance art. Which is sort of a confession that he’s a fraud.
My guess is that a fair number of Jones’ viewers don’t believe any of the stuff he comes out with, and watch Infowars in the same way people used to read the Weekly World News and its daft stories. Such as, ”Dad Was Bigfoot’, Says Beastie Man’, and a headline news story about a Grey alien giving his vote to Bill Clinton. Jones also probably realizes this, and doesn’t care. If you look on YouTube, there are number of videos explicitly labelled ‘Alex Jones Rants’, which seem to come from Jones or Infowars themselves.
And at least one British tabloid has run bogus stories on the same theme of secret genetic experimentation. Two decades ago, a couple of British newspapers also tried to go for the same market as the Weekly World News in the states. There was the Sunday Sport, now The Sport, and its story about a B-52 bomber being found on the Moon. The Daily Star also tried to plumb those depths. At the time, the Science Fiction chiller, Chimaera, was running on British television. This was a series about a journalist and female genetics engineer, who had uncovered a terrible secret plot to breed a human-chimpanzee hybrid to act as a new slave class. Although SF, the series is not as incredible as it seems. At one point Stalin was interested in creating such a ‘Humanzee’ hybrid to serve as soldiers in the Soviet Union.
While the series was running, the Star, if I remember correctly, carried a story, which claimed that similar genetic experiments were being carried out by the British government, and that their journalists had found laboratories containing elephants the size of rabbits. Well, they clearly hadn’t, although there certainly had been genetic experiments of a sort. This was the time of Dolly, the cloned sheep, and attempts to create a sheep-goat hybrid, experiments which made Chimaera and its plot all too plausible. However, the Star’s attempts to become even more stupid and bonkers than the Sport failed, according to Private Eye, and the wretched rag lost rapidly lost readers. They then had to make a complete volte-face, and go back to something resembling normal journalism. Jones’ tale of secret human experiments in British labs also hark back, consciously or not, to Chimaera and the daft story in the Star which it inspired.
While some people do see Jones as a joke, there is a very serious aspect to him and Infowars. Many people do take it seriously, as was shown by the incident at the Boston pizza parlour. And Jones was one of those backing Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He had the orange buffoon on his show several times, lauding him as the man, who would finally lead the revolt against the globalists. Which is quite ironic, if we’re talking about human-animal hybrids. Trump got very annoyed last year when the American comedian, Bill Maher, declared on his show that Trump was so orange, he must be half orangutan. Trump took the joke so seriously, he began waving his birth certificate around to show that both his parents were human, and threatened to sue for libel. Of course, in practice Trump has shown himself every bit as globalist as all the other politicians and businessmen, moving factories and parts of his business empire abroad to where he can exploit the cheap labour of workers in the Developing World.
As with the Star’s bogus stories about genetically engineered dwarf animals, I doubt anyone has been taken in by Jones’ nonsense about genetically engineered fish babies. But that doesn’t mean people don’t believe some of his nonsense, and he is having a destabilizing effect on American democracy through his promotion of the extreme right. However risible his stories are, Jones and his power to influence part of the American electorate have gone far beyond a joke.
More madness from the very warped mind of Alex Jones. Jones is the head honcho behind the internet conspiracy theory show, Infowars, and its companion website, Prison Planet. Jones believes, or affects to believe, that the American government, the UN, the ‘globalists’, the elite and liberals, Socialists and feminists are engaged in dire and foul conspiracies against the world and its people, and particularly those in America.
Over the years he has claimed that the richest 1 per cent of American society and industry, or at least their menfolk, sacrifice children in Satanic rituals at their annual secret meetings in Bohemian Grove in California. The Twin Towers collapsed because of a conspiracy by the American government, and not because Saudi-backed terrorists hijacked and flew two planes into them. President Obama was going to use to the legislation permitting the establishment of refugee camps to house disaster victims to seize power and herd people into what were really concentration camps. Humanity and the world were under attack by evil extradimensional entities, who might be demons or simply alien intelligences. And Barack Obama was fully under their control. He was truly the Devil’s emissary, because, apparently, he looked demonic, smelt bad and flies were always hovering around him.
Ditto Hillary Clinton. She was also under Satanic influence. She was part of a vast, paedophile conspiracy supplying children to leading politicians from a pizza parlour in Boston. She was also some kind of robot or cyborg, because something metal fell out of her trouser leg when she had a fainting fit during her campaigning. When she momentarily had some kind of problem swallowing a glass of water, Jones seized on this as evidence that she was either demonically possessed, or carrying some kind of alien spawn, which was about to come bursting out of her like the xenomorphs in the Alien movies. She was herself also a participant, with Bill, in black magic ‘spirit eating’ orgies put on by a performance artist.
The UN, Socialists and feminists are all engaged in some weird plot to take over the world and enslave everybody in it, particularly White men. Gay and transgender rights activists are a ‘transhumanist UFO cult’ to create a new, genderless, form of humanity.
How much of this Jones actually believes is a moot point. His ex-wife was suing him for custody of their children, on the grounds that he was utterly made and it was damaging their kids to see their Dad ranting and raving in the TV studio he has at his home. Jones’ lawyers responded by stating that Jones didn’t believe any of it, and it was all ‘performance art’.
Recently Jones has also been forced to issue apologies to people he has libelled on his programme. Someone took his comments about the pizza parlour in Boston very seriously indeed, and walked into it waving a gun around in order to free the child captives in the basement. There weren’t any children kept prisoner there, in the basement or anywhere else. Fortunately, no-one was shot or hurt in this incident.
Then he was threatened with legal action from the Turkish owner of a Yoghurt factory, who had a deliberately policy of employing immigrants. Many of these were Middle Eastern. Jones claimed that this, entirely respectable businessman, who was another paedophile, and that his employees had been responsible for a series of rapes. The businessman wasn’t, and his employees were also innocent. After being threatened with a writ, Jones ended up making a statement that he was entirely mistaken about it all on air.
Now he’s done the same to NASA. On Thursday, Jones had on his programme Robert David Steele, a former Reform Party presidential candidate, who claims to have been a case officer with the CIA. Steele spun a yarn that NASA had been kidnapping children to send them on a 20 year journey to be used as slave labour on Mars. Oh yes, and they were also been frightened and then killed, so that their blood and bone marrow could be harvested for use by the elites. The children had to be terrified when they died as this would enrich it with adrenaline.
NASA responded by denying everything, and pointing out that they didn’t have any kind of child labour camp on the Red Planet.
This story is, of course, absolute nonsense. For a start, 20 years is far too long for a journey to Mars. Spacecraft have to go at a certain speed – escape velocity – to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull if they are to go anywhere else in the Solar system, whether it’s the Moon or the other planets. I think current plans for a Mars mission estimate that it would take about 2-3 years or so to get there. A long time, certainly, but not as long as 20.
Then there’s the logistics and engineering problems of getting people to Mars. You need rockets of a certain size and power. Furthermore, any colonists for Mars, whether free or not, would have to carry all their food, water and air with them. The spaceships will also have to be shielded against cosmic radiation and solar flares. These weren’t much of a problem when going to the Moon, because of the relatively short length of the journey – about a week. Even so, if a coronal mass ejection – a type of massive flare known as a sun storm – had occurred, it would have fried the Apollo astronauts. These are a real threat for those intrepid souls going on the lengthy journey to the Red Planet.
There are also other medical problems caused by the lack of gravity in space. As the astronauts’ bodies don’t have to fight against the pull of the Earth’s gravity, muscles shrink. They also go to the toilet more than they would on Earth, and so start to lose calcium, weakening their bones. Hence their health is monitored, and those crews staying in space for a long time, such as during the Skylab programme from 1973-5, have to devote a certain amount of time each day to doing their exercise.
As there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ in zero gravity, and the fluid in your inner ear that tells you which is which also starts to float along with the rest of you, some astronauts suffer from ‘space sickness’, similar to the sea sickness some people feel travelling by ship.
There are also psychological hazards that may endanger the lives of the space travellers. I heard Dr Kevin Fong, who’s a specialist in space medicine, talking about them one year at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Fong pointed out that the strange environment of space can also affect astronauts’ mental health. Several of them have reported hearing sounds, such as dogs barking and babies crying, while in orbit. They can also find themselves doing strange, irrational things, which can potentially kill them, before being snapped out of it. One astronaut aboard Mir described how he was asleep one night, before being suddenly awoken by a noise. He then found one of his fellow astronauts suited up, ready to take a spacewalk. But the poor fellow hadn’t connected the air hoses. It takes about seven hours or so to put on and inflate a spacesuit, so that it protects its wearer from the hard vacuum outside their craft. None of this had been done, and if the astronaut had walked through the airlock, he would have been killed. Fortunately, the other astronaut was able to wake his friends and colleagues, who woke up and managed to stop him.
These are the hazards facing the extremely healthy men and women, who manage to pass the rigorous testing and gruelling grueling training programmes. Hopefully, one day we’ll have learned enough to make space travel sufficiently safe so that families with children can venture into the Deep Black. But we very definitely aren’t anyway near that level now.
This is sheer bullsh*t, and it’s not hard to see where it’s ultimately coming from. Somewhere in there is the influence of Alternative 3. This was an April Fool’s Day joke, broadcast by ITV in 1975. It was a bogus edition of a fake science programme, ‘Science Report’, which claimed that the Earth was dying, and so the Americans and Russians had secretly shelved their differences in order to colonise Mars secretly. Leading scientists were disappearing as they took up their new lives on the Red Planet. Ordinary people, meanwhile, were also disappearing. They were being kidnapped, lobotomised and ‘de-sexed’ to turn them into slaves as ‘batch consignments’, serving their elite masters.
The programme was a hoax, but unfortunately many people were genuinely taken in and didn’t realise that it was a joke. There was also a tie-in novelisation, which until recently was unavailable in the US. This led to rumours that it was all true, and had been deliberately suppressed by Them.
The result has been that a number of other conspiracy theories about secret government space projects have grown up around it, or been inspired by it. This latest nonsense appears to be one of them.
I don’t know how many people actually believe Steele’s story. Possibly very few, the kind of people, who bought into the lurid revelations of Commander X and his tales about secret collaboration with aliens. Or the late Bill English and his rubbish about meeting the Zeta Reticulan ambassador, Omnipotent Highness Krill, at a military base.
I doubt very many people actually believe the story, but that hasn’t stopped Jones having an effect. During the American presidential elections, he gave very vocal support to Donald Trump, who was a guest on his programme several times. He has libelled various blameless individuals, such as the Turkish yoghourt manufacturer. It’s a mercy that his stories about paedophile gangs didn’t result in someone being shot at that pizza place. He also notoriously claimed that the Sandy Hook school shooting was all staged, and that the children and others, who were killed and injured were ‘crisis actors’. This has led to people approaching and accusing the kids’ grieving parents with these claims.
And anti-racist activists are worried about the links Jones and his show have with the racist Alt-Right. This includes his fellow presenter, Paul Joseph Watson, who has inveighed against the threat Islam and Muslim immigration supposedly poses to western civilisation.
Jones is a clown, and his ranting can be hilarious, but there’s a very serious, very dark side to his show. It’s almost the very definition of ‘fake news’, and it is having a pernicious effect on politics in the US, as more citizens are encouraged to fear the terrible, but entirely imaginary Others that mean to harm and enslave them. While, of course, supporting right-wing Libertarian policies, which will deny them proper, decent medicine, welfare support, housing, clean water and education.
There have been a number of pieces put up on the alternative American news programmes on YouTube about the latest bizarre claim by Alex Jones. Or in this case, Jones’ lawyer. Jones is a notorious conspiracy theorist with his own YouTube show, Infowars, where he repeats all kinds of extreme rightwing nonsense about ‘the globalists’, the elite – who are, of course, evil shape-changing Reptoid aliens, the United Nations and politicians, mostly leftwing. It’s real tin-foil hat stuff. Amongst the codswallop he’s inflicted on his viewers over the years are rants about juice boxes containing chemicals that turn frogs gay; Hillary Clinton is demonically possessed, as is Barack Obama, and that they are both part of a Satanic paedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour. Clinton is also a cyborg and the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. This was another terrible school shooting. Odiously, it was seized on by Jones and other members of the same conspiracist right, as a piece of government psychological warfare, designed to make Americans willing to surrender their guns. And despite clear evidence to the contrary, he boosted Donald Trump during the election and after, claiming that he was successfully tackling ‘the globalists’. All when every piece of evidence shows the complete opposite. He also believes that those same globalists sacrifice small children when the American corporate elite meets at Bohemian Grove.
It’s crazy stuff, combining the long-term rightwing fears of the imminent arrival of a Satanic one-world global superstate, with a bitter hatred of the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama and Killary, mixed with David Icke’s bonkers theories about Reptoid aliens.
But now it seems, Jones, or at least his lawyers, are trying to tell everyone that he’s not mad enough to believe all this.
Jones is currently in the middle of a custody battle with Kelly Jones, his ex-wife. She doesn’t want him to have custody of their children, a boy and two girls, between 10 and 14, because Jones’ studio is in their home, and they see him ranting like a maniac. She particularly cites his statements that he’d like to break Alec Baldwin’s neck and would like to see J-Lo raped. She is afraid he’s urging people to take ‘felonious’ action. Which includes threats to a member of congress.
Jones has struck back. His lawyers have released a statement that Jones does not believe any of this, and that it’s just a piece of performance art. His fitness as a father should not be judged on the content of his show for the same reason that Jack Nicholson’s parental worth shouldn’t be judged on the basis of his character as the Joker in the 1990s Batman film.
In this clip from The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola point out that this makes him a fraud, and a joke. But unfortunately, the joke’s on his viewers, who took him seriously. They also point out that even if he isn’t genuine, he’s still having a damaging effect on American politics and society, like Andrew Breitbart. After Breitbart died, people celebrated him as ‘a real player’. But as Uygur points out, this isn’t a game. Jones’ and Breitbart’s actions had terrible, real-world consequences. In Jones’ case, someone took his claims of a paedophile conspiracy in the pizza parlour seriously, and walked in with a sub-machine gun with the intention of freeing the children Jones had claimed were imprisoned in the basement. The grieving parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook were pestered by Jones’ viewers, trying to get them to admit that it was all false and that no-one had been staged.
And as distressing as those specific incidents go, there are worse in his support for Trump. Jones supported Trump’s expansion of Obama’s military actions in the Middle East, and these have had terrible consequences with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Against Jones’ present statements is another he made in 2015, that he was training his son to be ‘a good little knight’, who was going to carry on his struggle. And he has made another statement from a little while ago, which contradicts his lawyers. He once claimed that he believed in all of it.
Uygur and Iadarola state that this gets into the complex issue of whether he is a good father. They accept that he genuinely loves his children, but then, so do murderous religious fanatics and neo-Nazis, but this does not stop them objecting to the way they bring up their children either. Uygur believes that side of it – whether Jones is a fit father or not – should be left private between Jones and his ex-wife. Uygur’s wife is a divorce lawyer, and he’s seen how ugly and nasty divorces and custody battles can be.
Uygur and Iadarola also make the point that if you wanted to discredit belief in genuine conspiracies, then one of the ways you could do it is by creating Alex Jones or someone like him. That way, when evidence of real false-flag operations appeared, you could mock those, trying to alert the public to them by saying that they were just like Alex Jones, and his theories about juice boxes turning frogs gay.
They conclude with the statement that the irony now is that Alex Jones, who has been shouting about fake news for years, has now admitted to having been ‘fake news’.
Incidentally, Jones actually does have a point about chemicals in the water turning frogs gay. Scientists and environmentalists are concerned about certain pollutants, especially in plastics, that do harm the sexual development of amphibians. Frogs and amphibians are more sensitive to these chemicals than other creatures, and so the effects are more pronounced. Frogs are being increasingly found with genital abnormalities, such as male frogs with female characteristics.
This is not quite like the frogs turning gay, and it isn’t being put into the water to make humans homosexual either, no matter what homophobic conspiracy theory Jones or people like him have dreamed up about this. One of Jones’ rants is about how gay rights are a transhumanist space cult to make humans all asexual. Which actually sounds like Jones saw an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Riker falls in love with a female throwback on a planet, whose inhabitants have no gender. However, the presence of such chemicals is causing birth defects in animals and possibly harming humans. And they are entering the water through industrial activity. So Jones’ is right about the presence of such chemicals, but completely wrong about why they’re there.
The New Year is a time when the commercial channels look back over the events of the previous year. For example, in sport the Beeb broadcasts the Sports Personality of the Year, ITV has Jimmy Carr fronting the comedy quiz, Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Charlie Brooker casts his jaundiced eye over the years’ events in a special edition of Screenwipe. In its prime, News Quiz on Radio 4 did much the same with a special, Christmas edition of the show looking back over the previous year. So it’s in this spirit that I’m reblogging Kevin Logan’s compilation of his favourite bits of sheer ranting lunacy from Infowars’ Alex Jones for 2016.
Jones is a conspiracy theorist, who really does seem to believe that the world is being run by a secret cabal of Satanists determined to destroy everything good and noble, including and especially America. He appeared a few years ago on Jon Ronson’s documentary series, Secret Rulers of the World, in which he claimed that the global elite meeting at Bohemian Grove every year had sacrificed a baby in a Devil-worshipping ceremony. He has his own internet show, Infowars. His broadcasting style is completely unrestrained. He’ll go off on long, splenetic tirades against the ‘globalists’ he believes are wrecking the planet and enslaving its citizens. He’s also done it on British TV. On Jon Ronson’s programme, he went off on a rant about how Americans wouldn’t stand for the globalists’ Satanic shenanigans as this was the Land of the Free, and they were serfs tugging their forelocks to the landlords, like Europe. Andrew Neil had him on his show over here, in which, sure enough, Jones starting ranting again. This ended with camera cutting away from the infowarrior to show Neil making circular motions with his finger around his head in the internationally recognised sign for ‘nutter’. Piers Morgan also had him on his show for an intelligent, informed conversation about the issue of gun rights in America after another mass shooting. Of course, he didn’t get any such thing. Instead, Jones took great umbrage at the question, no matter how mildly Morgan tried phrasing and rephrasing it, and ended up, once again, ranting and threatening the former Mirror editor with dire retribution if he turned up on the other side of the Atlantic to try to take the American people’s guns away.
This short piece by Kevin Logan, who makes vlogs attacking the Alt Right and the disgusting denizens of the Men’s Rights movement, who are frequently part and parcel of the former, contains some fine examples of unbridled lunacy from Jones.
He starts off attacking James Randi, the notorious Skeptic, who specialised in debunking fraudulent mediums and psychics, before going on to claim that the world really is run by Satanists. He also rants about how men are being told that they’re redundant, but there will be a spiritual uprising of real men against the machine Satanist overlords. He also rants about how it’s now hip to fail and be a slacker, have pus and dead babies all over your face, smoke weed and worship Satan. There’s also moments where he mocks liberals, prancing around with exaggeratedly effeminate hand motions, while ranting about how liberals claim their nice and fluffy but really want to kill and enslave everyone. But they look caring and hip while doing so. He also mixes in with his ranting his personal, family history. In his diatribe against Piers Morgan, Jones screams about how patriotic his family has been, as they fought on both sides during the Texas revolution against Mexico. Which as Logan points out, would make Jones a traitor if he personally had done so. He quotes the Japanese WW II admiral, Yamamoto, as saying that they had ‘awoken a sleeping giant’ with their attack on America. He then claims that Oklahoma, and, by implication, the rest of the US, would have caved in without a shot if the Japanese had turned up in pink uniforms claiming to be ‘trannies’. There’s also a scene where he shouts at someone to shut up, and calls them an ‘authoritarian’, which is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He also rants about how he is being maligned as sexist and racist, and that Fox News will run a hit piece about a serial stalker of women. They will then show his face, turning red.
This is all highly amusing, but there is a deeply serious side to these rants. Jones was and is a very vocal supporter of Donald Trump. He had him on his show several times during the presidential election campaign and the nominations for the presidency. He claimed that Trump was just the man to stand against the globalists, and is still doing so, despite the glaringly obvious fact that Trump is stuffing his entire cabinet with them. I don’t know how many people take Jones or his show seriously. I suspect a large portion of Jones’ ranting is just theatre. He’s got an outrageous image, which he deliberately plays up to as he knows this will get the rubes watching. It’s the same attitude the great actor and drunk Oliver Reed adopted. Reed was notorious for his drinking, but said in an interview once a few years ago that he presented this persona because this is what the public wanted. They didn’t want to see Oliver Reed the actor, he opined. They wanted to see Oliver Reed the hellraiser. And the same’s true, I think, for Jones.
And his rants do show, in a grotesquely distorted form, many of the issues that do haunt the American Right, as well as wider society. When he talks about the threat of the machines taking over, he’s actually addressing a genuine problem that has been discussed by serious scientists. Kevin Warwick, the professor of robotics at Reading University begins his book, March of the Machines, with a scenario set 33 years from now, in which intelligent machines have taken over and enslaved humanity. He has said in interviews that at one time he was very depressed by this prospect, before he turned to exploring cyborgisation. Way back in the 1990s, the Astronomer Royal, Dr. Martin Rees, also discussed the possibility of robots taking over in a book he wrote, Our Final Minute, on possible threats to the future of humanity. And this is quite apart from the threat of massive job losses – about 2/3 are expected to go – from widespread automation during this century.
Since at least the 1990s, and going back even further to the 1960s, if not long before, there have been conspiracy theories about Satanists running the American government. This became particularly strong with the Gulf War and George Bush senior’s comments about a ‘new world order’. This conspiracy theory draws partly on older theories, in which America is being secretly run by the Freemasons and the Illuminati, following 19th century reactionaries, who tried to explain the American and French Revolutions as the actions of clandestine groups trying to destroy the monarchical, aristocratic order of the ancien regime. These theories were later revived by the Nazi and Fascist theorists in the 20th century, like Nesta Webster, and then entered the UFO milieu in the 1980s and ’90s with the emergence of the Abduction myth. This produced another conspiracy theory that the US government were allowing aliens to abduct and experiment on humans, and even create hybrid human-alien children, in return for technological secrets. Several of the people pushing this myth declared that the aliens’ human agents were the ‘Illuminati’, and tried to support this using passages from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now, I’ve seen no evidence that Jones is racist or anti-Semitic. It’s clear from some of the videos he’s posted that he has Black employees on his show. But there is a profoundly racist aspect to the UFO conspiracy theories he espouses.
As for the homophobia, very many people, particularly amongst the older generation in Britain and America are unhappy with gay rights. They’re also deeply concerned about feminism and changing attitudes to gender roles. This has left many men feeling emasculated. And this has been an issue in American politics with strongly anti-feminist activists like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Anne Coulter, to name just a few. And while Jones’ statement that the new, Satanic order wishes to make men obsolete is farcically grotesque, masculine obsolescence was the stuff of journalistic discussion back in the 1990s. Some of the female journalists in the 1990s did write articles wondering what was the point of men, now that women had shown they could do their jobs, and in vitro fertilisation made them unnecessary for procreation. A number of feminist SF writers published novels about worlds, in which women prospered after the men had all been wiped out by a disease. Now this was an extreme view. Most women, I think, see feminism as being pro-woman, but not anti-man. As for the newspaper articles about men being obsolete, this was a favourite topic of the chattering classes generally. Will Self and J.G. Ballard had the same discussion in one of the literature periodicals at the same time. There is a genuine issue there, but Jones is probably taking far more seriously than many of the hacks, who wrote opinion pieces about it in the ’90s. Apart from that, Science Fiction has been exploring the topics of sex and gender roles since it first emerged as a genre in the 19th century. One pioneering American feminist depicted a future feminist utopia in Herland, while Theodore Sturgeon described a secret community of hermaphrodites in Venus Plus X in the ’50s or ’60s.
There’s also a section of American society that equates masculinity with militarism and firearms. Not only has Jones ranted against gun control, he’s also spouted weird diatribes about the UN coming to castrate every male. This latter seems to be a skewed misinterpretation of the Indian sterilisation programme of the 1970s. Years ago Magonia, a sceptical UFO magazine, commented on how closely guns and masculinity seemed to be linked in part of the American far Right in an article on the spoof space conspiracy, Alternative 3. This was an April Fool’s Day hoax by ITV, in which a fake science programme, Science Report, uncovered the fact that the Earth was dying. In order to preserve the human race, the Russians and Americans were co-operating secretly to colonise Mars. Selected intellectuals were being sent to the Red Planet to serve as the ruling caste. Beneath them were a class of slave ‘batch consignments’, who were deprived of independent will and ‘de-sexed’ through surgery. The producers of the programme also brought out a book. In the American version, the ‘de-sexing’ of the batch consignments was replaced with a statement about them being deprived of the ability to carry weapons. Which seemed to show how at least some in the American conspiracy fringe equated the loss of gun rights with castration.
As for the ranting about liberals wanting to promote failure as being hip, this seems very much to be a product of the Social Darwinist casts of American politics. The 19th century belief that helping the poor through welfare provision was a waste of resources because the poor were clearly biologically unfit, while businessmen deserved their power and status because they had proved their biological superiority in the competitive world of business, comparable to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’, is clearly very much alive and well. This also found expression in an SF short story. This described the racial deterioration of humanity following the decision of an American president not to follow the dictates of healthy ‘winner take all’ competitiveness. The result of this was that, millions of years in the future, humanity had degenerated to an unintelligent animal kept as a pet by the new dominant species, a form of Newfoundland dog.
And Jones’ hatred of globalism is clearly a product of American exceptionalism, which sees America as far more virtuous than any other country. As a result, America cannot allow itself to be bound by the rules it imposes on other nations. Hence the reluctance of the Americans to sign up to the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and the long diatribes by the Republicans and particularly the Neocons against the UN. Again, much of Jones’ bizarre ranting seems to be based on conspiracies theories going back to the 1970s which saw the UN as being set up to produce an oppressive ‘one world’ government. This is a government which the American Christian Right sees as Satanic. This will result in everyone in the world being marked by barcodes at birth, and the institutional persecution of Christians.
Jones’ ranting and his bizarre conspiracy theories and political views are grotesquely funny, but they’re fears shared by a large number of people in America and beyond. A significant number of people are alienated from a political system that seems intent on ignoring and marginalising them, and to some these malign conspiracy theories provide a convincing explanation for the perceived hostility and indifference of the government, or for the shifts in sexual morality and official attitudes towards gender roles during the past decades. Not only are these fears and the issues that inspire them problems in themselves, they are also partly responsible for the rise of Trump and the Alt Right. In that sense, Jones and his ranting need to be taken very seriously indeed, even if what he says is stupid, farcical nonsense.
Okay, I’ve put up several pieces tonight discussing just how nasty and rapacious the rich are. They are deeply selfish, and seem to have a profound psychological needs to inflict harm, degrade and impoverish those lower down the social hierarchy. And all while declaring that it’s all for the public good, and to encourage people to strive harder to better themselves. Or some other such rubbish that should have gone out with the 19th century.
On the other hand, some of the expressions of the increasing alienation between rich and poor have become extremely bizarre, like the growth of the Conspiracy counterculture and its belief that the rich are truly Satanists, or have made a malign pact with evil space aliens. Or both. One of the main figures on the conspiracy fringe is Alex Jones, who is prone to making some really bizarre rants about the depravity of the elite and super rich. In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses one of the great man’s rants which truly scales the heights of high weirdness. I offer for your entertainment this piece in which Jones states that everyone knows that the elites marry horses, dress up in werewolf costumes, demand to be worshipped, sacrifice their babies and finally nuke themselves.(!?)
Some of this seems to be a mangled memory of the worse traits of the Roman emperors. Caligula made his horse a senator. The ‘Great Beast’ in the book of Revelations may well refer to the emperor Nero. Nero when he was a young man, used to wander around the streets of Rome with other dissolute aristos, dressed up as an animal. He would then pick fights, wounding and killing, and raping women. It’s memories of the bizarre and depraved acts of the ancient world, which colour Jones’ views of the Bohemian Grove ceremony, where they symbolically slay ‘Dull Care’, as a real, human sacrifice. I don’t think it is, and when the ceremony was shown on Jon Ronson’s programme, Secret Rulers of the World, in which he examined the Conspiracy culture in the US, it seemed to be very obviously a mannequin, no more sinister than your average Guy Fawkes figure.
But it does prompt Jones to spectacular rants like these.
The problem is that although Jones is something of a buffoon, who goes way over the top, sometimes he’s exactly right. He hates war and the way the globalists have impoverished his country. He just thinks it’s all the fault of liberals, while the truth is, it’s all being done by Conservatives, following the logic of the free market, which he so vigorously defends.
Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 1980s
The one of the biggest stories over these last two weeks has been the allegation in Lord Ashcroft’s book on the current Prime Minister, Call Me Dave, that Cameron performed a sexual act with a severed pig’s head while he was at Oxford. This was in order to get into the elite Piers Gaveston Society, named after the favourite and gay lover of King Edward II. The story has gone around the world. Simply looking for it on Youtube, you can see that it’s not just been discussed in Britain, but been covered in America and the Antipodes. Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, pointed out that this was despite the fact that the story was supported by extremely little evidence. The ‘Street of Shame’ column in this fortnight’s edition of the magazine has two articles on the matter, one on the author of the allegation, the former Sunday Times’ columnist Isabel Oakeshott, and her apparently cavalier attitude to backing up her stories with supporting evidence. The piece, entitled ‘Heart of Oakeshott’, begins
Even the most hardened tabloid hacks are wondering how Isabel Oakeshott thought she could get away with claiming that the young David Cameron pointed his percy at a porker. None of Cameron’s contemporaries believed that he played hunt-the-sausage with a pig’s head or any other piece of charcuterie., Nor could Oakeshott produce a scrap of evidence.
With sublime insouciance, she explained on Newsnight that she didn’t do anything so laborious as check her facts. Rather she and the obsessively grudgeful Lord Ashcroft preferred to put it out there and let people “decide for themselves whether it’s true” – relying on the non-dom peer’s under-taxed fortune to deter libel writs.
The Eye also points out that as well as not really having anything in the way of evidence, she has arguably failed to protect her sources. While there’re no witnesses to the supposed act, there is supposed to be a picture. Oakeshott and Ashcroft haven’t been able to track down that, but it was apparently seen by the source of the story, whom they describe as ‘a distinguished MP, who was a contemporary of Cameron at Oxford’. As the Eyesays, that gives a rather narrow list of suspects.
The Eye also goes on to state that she has previous when it comes to not protecting her sources, and for retailing bogus stories. The Lib Dem MP, Chris Huhne, was jailed for a driving offence and perverting the course of justice after his wife, Vicky Pryce, told Oakeshott in confidence that she had swapped penalty points with the MP. Oakeshott then handed this piece of information, and all the other confidential email conversations that she’d had with Pryce, over to the rozzers, thus breaking the Omerta that journalists should always protect their sources.
She also wrote a similar bogus story about the decadent antics of the upper classes at Uni at the beginning of her career. According to the Eye, in 1999 she published a piece in the Edinburgh Evening News ‘Student Princes and the Upper Class of ’99’, which claimed that the members of the university’s wine-tasting society were guzzling champagne and oysters, and renting helicopters so they could fly down to London for hunt balls. This article too was spurious.
On last night’s Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop argued that the real story behind the allegations was Ashford’s own attempt to bribe his way into government by funding the Tories to the tune of £8 million. He did so in the hope that he would get a plum job as defence secretary. When he was finally offered a place in government, after being passed over several times, Ashcroft decided that it was below his station, and was a derisory gesture given the money he’d paid. So he wrote the book about Cameron, including the unsubstantiated allegation about sexual antics with a pig.
The Eye notes that while the bribery act only became effective in 2011, too late to mount a prosecution for Ashcroft’s attempts to buy himself a cabinet job, it could meet ‘the threshold test for the miscond7uct to be sufficiently serious to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder’. this was the charge against the News of the World journalists Lucy Panton and Ryan Sabey, who got their info from paying public officials. The prosecution failed, and they walked, just as the Eye expects Cameron to walk if he’s charged with the same offence. Nevertheless, the Eye takes the line that the prosecution would still be worth making.
The American progressive news programme, The Young Turks, also covered this case. They point out that, even if the story was true, it’s nothing more than what a lot of drunken frat boys get up to at Uni. It’s a fair point. The story is believable because it does sound very much like some of the bizarre antics that characterise the ‘Lad’ culture of drunkenness and crude and offensive sexual behaviour at universities. The sports societies and particular the rugby clubs have a reputation for similar antics. The Turks make the point that what’s really offensive is the fact that Cameron allegedly did so in order to join a society of rich snobs, who had absolute contempt for the poor. Here’s The Young Turks on Cameron’s supposed porcine antics.
Considering the antics of the Bullingdon club and their snobbish contempt for the poor, that part of the story is also highly credible, even if the episode with the pig isn’t. On the other hand, as Hislop pointed out last night, Cameron’s whole career in government has been full of despicable acts, such as the bedroom tax, cuts to welfare benefits and so on, which haven’t generated nearly so much outrage and interest as this story, weak and trivial though it is.
He’s right, though one reason why this story has received so much coverage, and has been believed by so many, despite its extremely slender basis in reality, is because it apparently epitomises the absolute corruption and depravity of Cameron himself. It presents him a snob, who’s prepared to perform any act, no matter how vile, shocking or degrading, in order to ingratiate himself with other over-privileged, spoilt upper class snobs. The sex act with the pig becomes a metaphor for the way his government has royally screwed the poor, the unemployed and the disabled.
And if these allegations seem trivial in a British context, you consider just how dynamite this would be if they had been made about an American president. A few decades ago Jon Ronson made a series, Secret Rulers of the World, on the strange milieu of conspiracy theorists and their belief that the world is being run by a secret cabal. In modern American Conspiracy culture, this is the Illuminati, who are aiming at a one world government to overthrow democracy, Christianity and capitalism in order to create a totalitarian global state. This secret conspiracy, often identified with the Freemasons, Communists, Jewish bankers, the Bilderburg group and the Trilaterial Commission, amongst other bête noirs of the American Right, is literally in league with Satan. The group performs vile orgies and ceremonies, involving human sacrifice. On one edition of the programme, Ronson filmed the ‘Sacrifice of Dull Care’, a ceremony performed at the Bohemian Grove meetings of America’s super-rich. It’s a kind of play, in which an effigy of ‘Dull Care’, is ritualistically killed and burned. It looks to me like it’s simply intended to show that the world’s elite plutocrats have put the cares of the world behind them in the few days they’re at the Grove networking.
The footage of the pretend ‘sacrifice’, shot by Alex Jones, one of the major leaders in contemporary American Right-wing conspiracy culture, had a truly explosive effect. Ronson showed it’s progress across successive news channels and programmes. The effigy was initially described as ‘about the size of a baby’. This then changed so that it was a real baby, which was being sacrificed by the global elite running America to Satan. For many Right-wing Americans, alienated from their government, this was further proof of the utter Satanic corruption of their government. Such allegations are part of the reason behind the formation of the Militia and Survivalist groups, and why so many Americans view Obama with suspicion as a Commie Satanist, quite apart from the similarly false beliefs that he’s also a Nazi and a Muslim. If the same amount of paranoia existed in Britain, or if the allegations had been made about Obama, then it would be seized on as evidence that Cameron or Obama was also a Satanist, and had performed the act as part of some depraved ceremony through which the elite showed their allegiance to the Devil, and their absolute contempt and complete lack of morality for everyone else. And there’d be even more people running around with guns urging you to stock up food, water and gold, and be prepared to kill the federal officials, who are coming to take your freedoms and your life away.
And the action’s of Cameron’s own party and government would make this twisted view all too credible. It was, after all, Leon Brittan, an alleged paedophile, who suppressed a dossier given to him about the activities of high-ranking paedophiles in the government and parliament. Jimmy Savile, a true monster, was a friend of Maggie Thatcher. Under Cameron the gap between rich and poor has widened immensely. The welfare state is being dismantled to the point where hundreds of thousands are only prevented from starving through the existence of food banks and the generosity of friends, neighbours and strangers, and the NHS is being sold off piecemeal. Corporate profits are booming, while the unemployed are virtually enslaved through workfare.
I gave this article its title as a reference to one of Will Self’s grim works, My Idea of Fun. This featured a cast of characters, who committed a number of vile and depraved acts, including having sex with the severed head of a pitbull terrier. Private Eye reviewed the book when it came out, and declared that the book’s preference for drugs, nude teens and so on was no-one’s idea of fun. Having sex with the head of a dead pig probably isn’t Dave Cameron’s either. But he does, apparently, take a sick delight in destroying the lives and wellbeing of the poor, the sick and the old through his misnamed ‘welfare reforms’. This is Dave Cameron’s idea of fun, and it’s truly disgusting.
It was Halloween on Friday, and the Beeb has been marking the season with a series of spooky programmes. For the past few weeks BBC 4 has been running a programme Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour, on the rise of Victorian Gothic architecture, art and literature, presented by the excellent Andrew Graham-Dixon. On Friday night itself, BBC 4 also screened a programme on Goth pop music, covering ’80s and ’90s stars of the genre such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and the other musical limners of the miserable, the uncanny and the undead. Yesterday, Strictly Come Dancing also presented a suitably Halloween-themed edition, with the celebs and their professional partners tripping the light fantastic dressed as ghosts, ghouls, zombies and witches. And tonight on BBC 4 again, the science broadcaster, Dr Alice Roberts, will be presenting a programme on the origins of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Roberts is professor for the public engagement with science at Birmingham University. A medical doctor, she was a regular member of Channel 4’s Time Team, examining the human remains excavated by the Team. She is, however, credited in the programme as ‘anatomist’. This is indeed what she was, a professor of anatomy at Bristol Uni before taking up her post in Birmingham’s great institution. It’s a suitable career description, considering the origins of the book’s monster in the charnel houses, and the book’s scientific basis in the dissecting rooms of the early 19th century. And so in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d write a suitably spooky piece for this blog.
The 1990s Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare
Some years ago I wrote a piece, ‘Satanism and Class Conflict’, for the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia. Not only did Magonia critically examine the ‘modern myth of things seen in the sky’, to use C.G. Jung’s description, it also examined other forms of contemporary paranormal experience, vision and belief. This included the Satanism scare, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to disrupt and ruin the lives of many innocent children and adults. This was the belief that there are multigenerational sects of Satanists, responsible for sexually abusing and killing children in occult rituals. The F.B.I. investigated such claims and found that there was little evidence for such cults in America. In Britain the scare finally collapsed with the publication of the government’s Fontaine report, which also concluded that such a vast, occult organisation did not, in fact, exist. This was not before tens, perhaps hundreds of children had been taken into care, and parents, teachers, nursery teachers and religious ministers had been accused and sometimes jailed, often on the flimsiest evidence. Some of the testimony which provided the basis for prosecution was the product of false memories. These were confabulated memories created either through regression hypnosis or when the person remembering them was in a state of psychological shock and under considerable pressure. The F.B.I. had briefly experimented with hypnosis in the 1950s as a tool for recovering consciously forgotten memories, which they believed nevertheless existed subconsciously, from crime witnesses. They abandoned it because the process led to the creation of false memories. These could be produced from the unconscious promptings of the hypnotist and interrogator, who may not have been consciously trying to direct the witnesses’ testimony. In the case of the Satanism Scare, some of the questioning of the witnesses and victims was frankly farcical, consisting of leading questions from investigators who already believed they knew the answer. These included evangelical Christians and radical feminists, though much of the investigation that finally discredited the Scare was also done by Christian evangelicals. Many professional law enforcement officials were furious at the way these investigations were conducted. I remember reading that the Yorkshire police force were extremely angry after the case against one notorious paedophile collapsed. The man had been responsible for abusing something like twenty or thirty children. There was no religious or cultic dimension to the crimes. The abuser was a simple paedophile, and the evil he did was entirely human, not supernatural. Unfortunately, the Satanism hunters became involved in the questioning of a seven-year old victim, who then changed his testimony to state that he was abused as part of Satanic worship. As a result the trial collapsed, and the paedo escaped justice.
Religious and Ideological Reasons for the Scare
The immediate causes of the Satanic Child Abuse panic, and the related fears of terrible Satanic cults abusing and sacrificing children and animals were the fears of some Christian groups to the rise in secularism and atheism in the contemporary West, and the emergence of New Religious Movements, including modern pagan revivals like Wicca. Some feminists came to believe in these Satanic conspiracies through the work of social workers and child support agencies, which discovered that sexual abuse was far more prevalent than previously believed. This has led to some grossly inflated and frankly unbelievable claims of the scale of sexual abuse, such as that 1/3 of all girls have been sexually assaulted by their fathers.
Poverty and Economic Origins
Fuelling the anxiety were more secular, economic fears. The communities which experienced such panics were often poor, with a poorly-educated population, threatened with economic decline, joblessness and the failure of their businesses. Faced with these stresses, some in these communities began to look for scapegoats in illusory Satanic conspiracies. There was a paper in the academic modern folklore journal, Contemporary Legend, tracing the origins of one such Satanism scare in Louisiana in the 1990s. The paper described the state’s folk as ‘conservative and hard-working’. Louisiana was an oil-producing state, and it used the income from the oil industry to subsidise its citizens’ housing. Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s the state’s oil economy collapsed. As a result, house prices and mortgages shot up far beyond what many Louisianans could afford. Many were forced to pack up and leave, and it was not unusual for the banks to receive the keys to certain properties they had mortgaged posted to them and the homes themselves left vacant by their former occupants. In this atmosphere of real economic fear and anxiety, some of the state’s people were left vulnerable to fears of a Satanic threat to their communities. Thus, when dismembered animal carcasses appeared, they were blamed on the activities of Satanists, and the scare escalated from there.
The Satanism Scare and Conspiracy Theory
The sociologist Jeffrey S. Victor, in his book on the Satanism Scare, Satanic Panic, also notes that society’s need to find a scapegoat to persecute, whether Satanists in the 1990s or Jews in Nazi Germany, occurs during economic depressions when there is a widening gulf between rich and poor. This was certainly the case in post-Thatcher Britain and America. In many of the rumours, the Satanists abusing and killing the unfortunate children and animals were wealthy businessmen. These in turn were connected to fears of the occult orientation of particular companies. Proctor and Gamble, for example, were rumoured to be Satanists, based on no more than the design of their company’s logo, which shows a moon and thirteen stars. They attempted to counteract this by redesigning their symbol, and through a very aggressive legal campaign against those repeating the accusation. The Satanism scare was also part of a wider set of fears about the malign nature of the American government itself. George Bush snr notoriously referred to the world after Gulf War I: Desert Storm, as a ‘new world order’, echoing the words of Adolf Hitler, who also referred to Nazism as his ‘new order’. It also connected to conspiracist fears and theories about the origins of the American Revolution. The back of the dollar bill shows an eye in the pyramid, the symbol of the Freemasons, along with the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saeculorum’ – New World Order. This has been seen as evidence that not only were the American Revolutionaries Freemasons, but that the Masons have been secretly manipulating the country and its leaders ever since for their own malign purposes. When Bush launched the First Gulf War, this was seen by some as part of the global ambitions and schemes of the ruling Masonic elite. I can remember reading a piece in the small press magazine, Enigma, claiming that the Gulf War was caused by a malign secret alliance of Freemasons and Satanists.
Fears of the Underclass in the Blairite ‘Jago’
At the other social extreme, the Magonians themselves noted several times in their articles that the Satanism Scare represented a return of Victorian social fears about the working classes and the emergence of the contemporary underclass. Just as the Victorian upper and middle classes viewed the lower orders with suspicion as ignorant, superstitious, vice-ridden and potentially seditious, so the underclass have been cast as malign, feckless, immoral and a threat to good social order but the guardians of contemporary respectable morality, like the Daily Mail. You can recognise a kinship between the Edwardian novel, In the Jago, written by a radical journalist about the Peaky Blinder street gangs terrorising the slums of London about the time of the First World War, and modern journalists describing the horrors of contemporary sink estates. Unfortunately, there is a difference between In the Jago and modern treatments of the underclass. In the Jago viewed the street gangs and their members as the products of the human misery created through the poverty and desperation of the slums and contemporary Edwardian society. With the notable exception of Owen Davies’ Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class, most contemporary journalists seem content simply to declare that the poverty and despair faced by today’s poor is simply their fault. At its very worst, this attitude has produced the garish freak show of Jeremy Kyle, in which a succession of the extremely dysfunctional poor and maleducated appear to accuse each other of stealing each others partners.
Real ‘Pseudo-Satanic’ Crime
The type of occult crime described by the Satan hunters doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, there are occult-tinged crimes that sociologists like Victor have described as ‘pseudo-Satanic’. These are perpetrated by sick and twisted individuals, either from their view of the world or simply to add an extra thrill to their abuse of children or animals. Some of these are maladjusted teens, sometimes from repressively religious families, who have come to believe that they themselves are evil and that evil is stronger than good. You can add to this category the extreme elements of the vampire subculture. At one level, it’s simply a subculture of otherwise well-balanced young people, who like dressing up as vampires and enjoy horror literature, like the kids who go to the Goth weekend at Whitby. Others have become convinced that they really are vampires, and have created an entire parallel society like that in Anne Rice’s novels. And a minority have committed murder, based on their conviction that they are indeed members of the undead.
Satanism Scare as 1990s Phenomenon
Looking back, it seems such fears of Satanic conspiracies, whether global or local, are a distinctly 1990’s phenomenon. Valerie Sinason and some of the others responsible for the Scare in Britain are continuing their work, unrepentant about the immense harm they have done, and occasionally drawing the attention of Private Eye. Yet despite the renewed war in the Middle East and the massive escalation of poverty and the gap between rich and poor under Blair/Brown and then – and especially – Cameron, there hasn’t been renewed panic about Satanists. Some of this may be due to the decline in organised religion in Britain and America. It may also be due to the increased acceptance of alternative religions, at least amongst young people. The Mind, Body and Spirit sections of bookshops include books on Wicca and Western witchcraft, and the religion has been presented sympathetically in a series of fantasy film and TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also in the 1990s. There was some hysteria amongst some, mostly American Fundamentalist Christians, about the supposed occult content of Harry Potter, but this mostly seems to have died down. The Pope even thanked J.K. Rowling for her books’ role in stimulating children’s imaginations.
9/11 and Modern Conspiracy Fears
Some of the reasons why the Satanism Scare has not emerged again may be due to the real fears created by 9/11 and George W. Bush’s Neo-Con global campaign. Right-wing American fears that their government is still engaged in a malign programme of oppression, manipulation and exploitation of its own people, and expanding this to subjugate the other peoples of the world, is still very much present. It is the origin and raison d’etre of the ‘Truther’ campaign in America, and Alex Cox’s Infowars broadcasts. This is mostly secular, but it does take in some of the earlier fears about America’s supposedly Satanic elite. Part of this is based on the footage of the ‘sacrifice of dull care’, performed by America’s super-rich as part of their weekend of networking during the summer at Bohemian Grove. And rather than looking for the subversive activities of Satanists, much of the religious and cultural politics over the last decade has been taken up with the emergence of the New Atheism and its extremely aggressive attack on religious faith.
Threat of Radical Islamism, Immigration and UKIP
There has been the all too real threat of attack by radicalised Western Muslims, such as those responsible for the Boston bombing in America and the 7/7 bombing in the UK. This has served partly to direct Western fears of a terrible and subversive ‘other’ outwards, towards a global threat from militant, radical Islamism, and within to Britain’s Muslim minority. Finally, fear of a subversive threat from outside British society has also been concentrated on the continuing debate and controversy about immigration, and the rise of UKIP. Farage has regularly declared his party to be secular, non-sectarian and non-racist, but its major donors are all former Tories, and UKIP politicians have made a series of racist statements and comments while standing on an anti-immigration platform.
Real Need Now to Attack Poverty Caused by Cameron and Tories
Even if the Satanism Scare has largely vanished, there is always the possibility that it may revive, or the place of imaginary Satanists in causing abuse and destruction may be taken by another minority group. The material poverty and economic insecurity that created the pre-conditions of fear and anxiety that fuelled these fears is still very much present, and under Cameron getting worse. This needs to be tackled, and tackled now. Not by looking for Satanic conspiracies that don’t exist, and fearing your neighbour, but by fearing what the government will inflict next on the very poorest and most desperate in British society. It’s time to stop it.
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