Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

In websites such as infowars.com and prisonplanet.com, many books, videos, and a regular his syndicated talk radio show, you’ve discovered the work of Alex Jones and like minded people.

Jones defies quick categorization. In his own words, he rejects the left-right political classification scheme, and has shown a penchant for strongly criticizing American politicians of all political parties and ideologies – for example, claiming that George W. Bush’s administration permitted or promoted the 9/11/2001 attacks for political gain, and Barack Obama promoted the current economic decline in order to be able to “create a new world order”.

There’s a huge amount of discussion about Jones and his ideas, which tends to be dominated by his loudest supporters and detractors. What can be safely said is that Jones and his supporters make claims without verifiable evidence, based on appeals to emotions, and that these claims tend to focus on the view that powerful secret organizations controlling the world, and that are sometimes false by their own later admission, intended to shock the listener into “waking up” to accept their views. When stated as a general system of belief, it’s difficult to objectively analyze this claim, because clearly many things, such as companies, are controlled by “powerful secret organizations” – their managements teams and partners or shareholders, and clearly such organizations exert as much influence as they can manage over US and other national governments.

The best advice I can give about the work of Jones and similar people is to read as much about it as possible, using your best critical thinking skills, and form your own opinion. This requires more research than for most objective, scientific subjects, because Jones and his supporters and opponents actively work to make it difficult to find reliable information about them and their ideas - “infowarfare”, in their own words, the objective of which is winning, rather than reaching correct conclusions. For example, in the above wikipedia link, read not just the article, but the talk page and article history, as many items have been added and removed from the article over its 6 year history. For other websites, archive.org can be useful in reviewing the often quickly appearing and disappearing writing involved in infowar.

My personal opinion is that Jones and similar people aren’t of much value to people interested in understanding society and politics, except possibly to acquaint very inexperienced people with the notion of questioning the validity of unsupported claims, even those made by seemingly reputable outlets, such as news companies – a common-sense idea that can be summed up by the short phrase “question authority”. It’s important, I think, to avoid falling into the fallacy of believing that, if someone says, correctly, that some claim is false, everything he says is true, a fallacy which I think many supporters of Jones and similar people have fallen into.