Alex Jones: He's shrill, and he's a shill

Here's a fascinating, well-written expose on America's favorite conspiracy blowhard, Alex Jones of Texas:

Turns out, to my dismay, he’s actually a con man the whole way down. Plastered all over infowars.com and repeated over and over on his radio program are gold advertisements, as seen in this youtube video, for Midas Resources. In fact, on infowars itself there is a whole section dedicated to Midas. That alone doesn’t seem to be particularly surprising as the American crazy has always had an affinity for that shiny post-apocalyptic bargaining chip. Belief in the imminent collapse of society, which Alex Jones spouts and spouts and spouts, goes hand in hand with buying up large quantities of something that supposedly will always have value.

Midas Resources is owned by a Mr. Ted Anderson… who also happens to be the President of Genesis Communications Network. In fact, in Midas Resources’s own About Us page it states clear as day

Midas Resources was founded in 1996 by Ted Anderson. Mr. Anderson spent many years as a precious metals broker working for large corporations before striking out on his own. In 1998, he launched the Genesis Communications Network (GCN) to promote the importance of investing in precious metals.

How much more blatant can you get? GCN was founded with the sole purpose, along with Alex Jones, to shill gold.

Midas wasn't the only con. As we noted in an earlier post, Little Alex and his droogies promoted the National Inflation Association, another hoax perpetrated by notorious pump-and-dumper Jonathan Lebed. Basically, those guys sold fear stories about inflation -- yeah, inflation, as though that's the big problem in this economy -- and then pumped up the stocks in various mining ventures. This was no small-time con: Fox News was a huge promoter of that crap.

I did a nice little video expose of Lebed's scheme here. (I may include the video at the end of this post.)

So...does Alex really believe in the conspiracies he promotes? Maybe. But fear has been lucrative for him, so I don't think he's particularly careful about what he does and does not choose to believe.

Whenever a real covert action goes down, there are always three layers:

1. The version given to the mainstream press.

2. The wackyland conspiracy version, which is heavily pushed by some well-funded fear-peddlers, and which is designed to discredit the truth; and finally...

3. The truth.

Alex Jones is a guy you can count on to give you Number Two.