conspiracy theories

An Interview With Alex Jones, America’s Leading (and Proudest) Conspiracy Theorist

170183507OS026_THE_BILDERBE Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty

Alex Jones is the massive Texan mouthpiece of domestic paranoia with a megaphone that reaches millions. Jones’s dispatches about “false flag” operations and the New World Order spread through a cross-platform assault, including an eponymous radio show syndicated on dozens of stations, a YouTube channel with more than 330,000,000 views from over 700,000 subscribers, and a series of films with titles like Police State IV: The Rise of FEMA and Fall of the Republic: Vol. 1, The Presidency of Barack H. Obama (plus the 9/11 truther bible Loose Change). An old friend of Ron Paul and the director Richard Linklater, the libertarian populist — who can sound disarmingly liberal at times, not far from the Occupy movement — has uncomfortable theories about the moon landing, JFK’s assassination, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon bombing, each guaranteed to offend. “Just hope I’m wrong about this stuff,” he says.

What do you think is the current mood of the American people under President Obama? Do you feel like people who are skeptical have been awakened at all? Or are people, in your view, still asleep?
I think all the poll numbers show that media and government is at an all-time low in modern history because of the betrayals and the stonewalling by the power structure. And most polls show upwards of 90 percent don’t believe that Oswald acted alone. The state-run media and its allies are just digging the hole deeper and continuing to call everyone conspiracy theorists. But I welcome it. I welcome it. The club media, the presstitute media, keep it up. Just keep lying and be like Marie Antoinette saying let them eat cake. Keep going.

You don’t reject the term conspiracy theorist?
No. People now learn that that means someone who questions known liars in government and media. So that definitely means what heretics did during the Inquisition. I find myself proud to be listed as a thought criminal against Big Brother.

Secretary of State John Kerry said recently, “To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” What do you make of that?
It shows that people like him, they understand that they’ve lost the public. And that he can now say what he really thinks about it. Because it’s just 90 percent or more do not believe the official story.

One of the head nurses saw a bullet separate from what was shown on television fall out of Kennedy’s neck. He was full of bullet holes. Killing most of the witnesses did not stop that information from coming out. I’ve interviewed the undertaker when they came in to get Oswald’s body. Or they came in and took his hand, dipped it in ink and put it on the gun and told him he never saw that. I’ve interviewed LBJ’s mistress, I’ve interviewed his lawyer. All of them. 

I had family live right here in Austin. And it was just openly powerful people bragging that we killed that son of a bitch Kennedy. I’ve met famous Texans that just laugh about it, that say he deserved to die, off the record. I’ve lived out here. I’m not going to go any further than that. But I’ve had family that dated folks that worked for LBJ. I’ll just leave it at that. 

Speaking more generally, how do you think the mood of the country has changed since then? 
Obama has come along at a point where the public has caught the power structure in so many lies that his lies or deceptions or broken promises are more glaring than past ones. So he has the misfortune of being the president when the camel’s back broke because of one too many deceptions.

So you don’t believe that Obama is somehow worse than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush?
I don’t think he’s a lesser of two evils or greater of two evils. He is a more effective of evils. To paraphrase Cynthia McKinney, and I think she’s quoting someone else, but the point is that it’s been said by others that Obama wasn’t a lesser of two evils with McCain or Romney. He would be more effective. That’s why there was a consensus in the power structure. Put this guy in, you know, he’s well spoken. He comes off as modern, trendy. He’ll sell lies better than some old white guy. But the bigger the hoax and the bigger the hope, the harder it falls. 

Do you have your eye on anyone for president in 2016? Rand Paul? Or is the presidency a lost cause in your eyes?
They’re promoting a self-propelled stomach from New Jersey, Christie, because they think he can be a ringer and basically make sure that no real populist movement can get back into office through the libertarian elements of the tea party. So they’re going to push him and Marco Rubio and all these neo-con RINO, Republican-in-name-only type people. And that’s why you see the Republican and Democratic Establishment circling the wagons against the real tea party.

This country is in deep crap. And both parties are screwed up. And we’re being literally strip-mined by big corporate interests in a very cold-blooded manner. We’re being extracted. 

When you say there is a real populist movement, who do you believe is at the forefront of that?
I don’t romanticize the tea party as a whole or the Republican Party. I am a big critic of Bush. But real opposition to the Syria war didn’t come from the Republican war hawks, didn’t come from Obama and the so-called antiwar movement. It came from Rand Paul and people like myself and others. 

Every Republican and conservative I know pretty much hates George Bush now. And really gets it in hindsight and is ashamed of themselves for the lies of 2003. The whole thing is libertarian. If there was a Republican in office doing all of this horrible stuff right now with the aid of the Democratic Establishment, I would be supporting a real liberal movement that was against torture and NSA spying and corporate looting. It doesn’t exist. 

What do you see as the biggest threat to the United States at the moment?
That most of the Fortune 500 have decided to maintain and expand their power through monopolies and oligopolies that government regulation and cronyism can bring. And that leads for total stagnation and collapse. And that they’ve adopted the idea of impoverishing the general population as a tool of knocking out competition and cementing their hegemonic control. Historically, in pretty much every case, that’s what elites do when their degenerates are failing: impoverish them to make them dependent to be controlled. That is a culture and an empire in a death spiral. It won’t take us 200, 300 years to die like Rome. Everything is accelerated now towards the singularity and different forms of the pre-singularity. 

What are your current preparations for these sort of things? I’ve read that you have food supplies and that sort of thing. What steps are you taking?
Well I’ve moved out into the countryside. 

In Texas.
Yes, and I have made preparations for a long depression. And more importantly, politically, I have done everything I can to stop that. But it’s really hard to stop when General Electric is heading up a presidency and an energy council can shut down all the power plants that they don’t own or control and then exempt themselves. And then I watch my power prices double. And it’s all funny to the Establishment to be crushing people like this. And as long as everyone talks with an NPR voice, it makes it okay, I guess.

And what do you make of the state of the media?
If you don’t toe the insider, corporate-monopoly capitalist line, you’ll find yourself out of a job. But everybody, at a grassroots level, knows that things are degenerating. 

And alternative media is just grasping at bygone ideals of liberty set against Establishment media. There’s no doubt that people are going to go to the alternative, as screwed up as the alternative is. I don’t think the alternative is perfect either. But the organized systematic evil, evil of the old state-run media, is really a sight to behold. 

And Glenn Beck, do you feel like he ripped you off a little bit? Or do you consider him an ally?
I’ve been critical of Glenn Beck when he’s attacked me a lot in the past. And I do know that I helped wake up Glenn Beck, or as the Establishment would say, radicalized Glenn Beck. But I’m hoping I did it. What I’m talking about unfortunately has not come true; it was already true. It’s just that people now discovered that it’s true for themselves. And so I just decided that I’m not going to fight with anyone if I agree with them 60 or 70 percent on things. He and I agree on 99 percent of things. And Glenn Beck stopped attacking me and making stuff up about me, so we have a truce going right now. 

To what do you owe the popularity you have reached at this current moment?
Because I really do real research. I don’t try to come off like some stuffy journalist or analyst. I go do real research. And then I get angry about it sometimes. And people are looking for what’s genuine. 

And I don’t think I’m right about everything either, but I wish I was wrong about more things. It’s really upsetting to see all of my analysis, the vast majority of it, turning out to be accurate. Sure, it sounded crazy when I said they put microphones in streetlights sixteen or seventeen years ago. Because an engineer came by my office and he was installing them in Austin. And I went and found the schematics of the purchase order and found out that they were putting thousands of microphones around Austin. And they came out in the papers and said that those are gunshot detectors. And sure they had a program running on them that could hear gunshots but it was also being used to listen to people. And they made fun of me in the paper and said I was a conspiracy theorist.

I knew about the NSA because I was talking about it ’96, ’97. And I would do remotes at the rodeo or car show and fair. And I had different executives and high-level engineers come up to me and say, “Listen, the NSA isn’t in Fort Meade” — there’s a whole floor at the local telecom, and everything goes through it. And then it’s sent on to government facilities. And I would show schematics. And I was like, Wow, they would have Army soldiers in plainclothes sweating me in the Target parking lot [and] to shut up if I knew what was good for me. I’ve already been through all this stuff. 

I admire these folks who are prominently doing this. Look at Greenwald’s boyfriend being harassed, now listed as a terrorist just to harass Greenwald. He’ll be lucky if he gets to travel to the U.S. again. And then they lock these guys up, that’s why they’re heroes. I know. I’ve been through it. I don’t get up and say I’m a hero, I’ve broken all this for other people. I was one of the first to be doing this, and I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was being given real schematics and documents. There’s microphones in the digital cable box and it tracks everything you watch. This stuff is real.

Basically, we as a nation have consumed poison. Drank it like nightshade in a goblet. And if we don’t vomit it up very quick, we as a country will expire like Nazi Germany. It’s not like Germans were bad, it was the Nazi Germans. It’s not that the Chinese are bad, it’s the Communist Chinese leadership is bad. We have a bad corporatist, globalist elite. And the media is trying to deny that it’s going on. And it’s like, “It’s your own peril, you guys.” It is real.

And again, I know the Establishment knows they’re in trouble. That’s why Homeland Security and the armored vehicles and the bullets and the demonization are for. And they sit up there and lie and say everyone loves us, everything is fine. We’re perfect. Anyone that doesn’t trust us is a terrorist. They do that just so the final sheep out there don’t turn and go, “Oh my gosh, the house of cards collapsed.” It’s a total confidence game. It’s like we’ve caught the Establishment in bed with our wife. And we’re saying “Get off of her.” And they’re saying “I’m not in bed with your wife. Your wife’s not even here.” And it’s, even the most weak-minded person doesn’t buy into that when they’re not even sheets on them. I mean, they are in the act. I mean, we’ve caught them absolutely butt naked. It’s like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” 

I know the term false flag has been associated with you recently. What does that mean exactly for people who might not know?
It’s a historical phenomenon of governments, institutions, individuals framing other people with crimes they’ve committed, generally for a political aim. Hitler in Operation Himmler staged terror attacks along the Polish-German border and then blamed it on the Polish military as a pretext to invade Poland. And those were established, declassified in the Nuremberg trial. 

Another thing would be to attack a coastline flying the banner of a country and then politically blame them for the attack. Let’s say that there’s a neutral country, in the case of England, that you want to join you in a war. Well, you simply pick a smaller village, have your ships go in with people who speak that language who you want to frame, say the French. You then attack the village, burn a bunch of their ships, screaming obscenities and flying the flag, and then sail away. And especially playing on the fact that there wasn’t a lot of accurate communication. It would simply get reported. That the port at X point was hit by the French. And so that country that was attacked would join the British. And generally, they would have already talked to the country’s leader and said “We’re going to attack you. Your public doesn’t want to be in this war, but we’re going to attack you in the next few weeks, so you can sign on to this.” 

But after mass shootings at Sandy Hook, Aurora, etc., there’s been no change to gun or security laws. Why?
Overall, crimes with firearms are down 49 percent since 1992. Violent crime is down 60 percent total. And if you look at the real Justice Department numbers, more guns make less crimes. Look at Chicago, New York, D.C., where they have higher crime rates, they have gun bans. And so the Establishment wants our guns so that they have a monopoly of force, and that’s what all tyrants seek. 

And the public has hardened. There will be, if they take our guns, a civil war. And I don’t want that to happen. But that’s what I told Piers Morgan. If you take our firearms, 1776 will commence again. The Establishment might actually form a false flag whereby, starting a civil war, they think that’s their pretext to come in and Obama is the new Lincoln and he takes over. But I think the Establishment has probably weighed the outcome of that. And it’s a war they would lose. 

But if you believe that these mass shootings were so the government could tighten security, why hasn’t security been tightened?
Tyrants aren’t perfect — look what happened to the old Soviet Union, look what happened to Hitler. But I’ll say this: All these events were very, very suspicious, but at minimum, the tragic events were used to try to create guilt on the part of the average gun owner. So via the guilt trip, they would accept their individual liberties curtailed. It would be like murdering people with a car. Let’s take cars from everybody. Or restrict them. Or if someone killed someone with a butcher knife, let’s restrict butcher knives, like they’re trying to do in England. 

They’re not letting a good crisis go to waste, as Rahm Emanuel said. We understand who they are and what they’re up to. And we understand all the crimes they’ve committed. They staged Fast and Furious and tried to blame the Second Amendment. Even CBS News got those documents. They were going to blame the Second Amendment for that. We’re just aware who they are and what they’re up to. 

Do you feel like those changes that have been enacted will ever be undone or are we a permanent post-9/11 America? 
Oh, no, no. They’re not going to be undone. They’re going to be made far worse each year and progressively. You see the power structure that has hijacked America. When they were in control of the Third World countries, they put in the worst dictators, they tortured, they killed, they cut the food off. They created living hell. So the people running our country want to do that here. Over and over again, they do the worst, most horrible things they can to other nations. Because that’s how these corporations operate. They want to shut off the resources to everybody and exempt themselves so only they’re allowed to thrive and take over like cancer. This is all on record.

And by the way, I’ve had family who works for the government, black ops, so I grew up not being a naïve idiot. 

How does your family background come into play with what you think you know now?
I have cousins, great-uncles, and people that worked in operations. And they said that it’s so unbelievably evil and corrupt. It’s just, “Get on your knees and cry.” It’s bad. See, the argument was about being more evil than the evil, but all that really happens, you know, to defeat it is that the truth must be guarded by a bodyguard of lies. But really, you just become evil. You don’t adopt the Devil’s tactics and beat the Devil, you become the Devil. You understand that? Just hope I’m wrong about this stuff.

Alex Jones: America’s Top Conspiracy Theorist