Dark Minds
© Psychology TodayDark Minds: When does incredulity become paranoia, Psychology Today
There is a disinformation program literally for everyone. No matter who you are - what your interests are, what your beliefs are, which way you're focusing - there is a website set up just for you to take you in and to vector your thinking and your attention into thinking the way that they want you to think.

¬ Laura Knight-Jadczyk
A recent article in Salon is another in a series of pieces that draws attention to the rantings of Alex Jones, through his web TV show and websites, infowars and prisionplanet. Psychology Today's September edition (pictured left) also fans the flames, it is entitled Dark Minds: When does incredulity become paranoia. With Alex Jones the centerpiece, it makes the case that those seeking the truth are essentially a product of mental instability, by elevating him to 'Conspiracy King' status and associating his readers as mentally ill.

In a similar vein, the Salon article presents a parent's concern that their son had become sucked into "the Internet conspiracy black hole created by some guy named Alex Jones." The request for help to guide their nephew "away from this cultish fear-monger" is met with this advice:
"I do not want to conclude without making explicit that if he has dyslexia or some kind of attention-deficit disorder, those are things that should be diagnosed and treated on their own. If his mother's coddling has prevented him from facing up to these possible problems, that could be adding to his anxiety. So I would definitely, in addition to the camping trip, or wilderness expedition, do what you can to bring to light any organic, diagnosable and treatable conditions he may have."
In both of these articles we have the suggestion that: Alternative views to the mainstream media found on the internet have been created and led by Alex Jones; and people who are attracted to these views have some form of learning difficulty or psychological disorder.

At the same time there has also been a great deal of recent press coverage on Charlie Sheen's recent partnership questioning the official 9/11 story. The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported an almost identical article:
Sheen, who appears in the hit comedy series Two And A Half Men, made his claims in the transcript of a fictional encounter with Mr Obama, called Twenty Minutes With The President. It was published on the website of radio show host Alex Jones, two days ahead of Sheen's appearance on Jones's show today. Most of his observations make up the basis of all the conspiracy theories surrounding the terror attack. Those who support the theories in the U.S. are known as Truthers.
Both newspapers are considered to be 'right wing' outlets that support a conservative/Republican agenda. They normally shy away from reporting any stories that question the official conspiracy that the government is complicit.

Why now is Alex Jones getting so much media attention?
Why Is Alex Jones being portrayed as THE spokesman for alternative views?
Why are readers of his material being linked to mental health disorders?

Is it because he has become the pied piper of extremist truth seeking that brands all the rest as a mental illness?

A false champion of truth
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A police officer warns protestors as he holds the pin on a canister in Pittsburgh, Thursday Sept. 24, 2009 where the G20 summit, expected to begin in Pittsburgh.
Alex Jones is, in the opinion of Sott.net, part of a limited hang out campaign whereby the attention and energies of those people who have the capacity to realise that something is very wrong with our world are directed towards issues that are either dead ends or which, if pursued, will lead to their own destruction. Jones' "take back the government" shtick is one such issue. If Jones were worthy of his position as a leading figure in the 9/11 etc. truth community he would be directing people's attention towards reading between the lines of current world events. He would not be encouraging a survivalist and revolutionary attitude which ultimately plays directly into the hands of the Powers That Be and facilitates the ramping up of police brutality.

As a reader of this article, you will be aware that America now has all the hallmarks of a Police State, as recent harassment of protesters at the G20 Summit in Pittsburg clearly show. Waving a protest flag at CS-gas-wielding military personnel is (pardon the pun) likely to end in tears, but this confrontational behaviour is the proposed AJ solution.

Secret Support

Websites such as SOTT.net routinely encounter discriminatory censorship at the hands of the market-leading search engine Google (The Disappeared: SOTT.net and Google's conspicuous omissions). Other sites that do their best to present an objective picture of the orchestration of world events also suffer. See: Google censors pro-Palestinian news sites and Google's censors: The cat is out of the bag: Uruknet.info. As Orwell said, lies of omission are the worst and by contrast, Prisonplanet, which avoids mentioning the negative influence of the Israeli lobby and Zionist atrocities, manages to have its 'news' articles appear in Google News listings. [Just search one of their favourite topics 'Bilderberg' to see for yourself]. Since it is so easy for Google to decide which information will receive the most attention, doesn't it make you wonder why the censorship toolbox isn't switched on for Jones' views? Instead his presence is inflated across the alternative spectrum. His talent for self-promotion plays a part in this, but the propaganda matrix against which he rails provides him the stage.

Other red flags include the subtle references to infowars on mainstream TV channels, which suspiciously seem aimed to encourage attention. The following news clip is a good example. From around the minute mark, the report becomes a subtle infomercial - almost like a Guerrilla marketing campaign.


The fact that Jones is now being given significant exposure and airtime by the mainstream media - specifically by disinformation-central Fox News - also does not seem to have raised any question marks among his faithful followers.

Fundamentalist Revolution

Jones' message is one of fear and revolutionary reaction. 'Revolt and take back the government' would be his mantra. However, 'the government' cannot be 'taken back'. 'The government' is not what Americans were told it is in grade school. Things have changed. Or rather, they were never the old way to begin with. America's history is a myth, like all national histories are a myth, generated to control people through their beliefs. The American myth revolves around two documents: the American Constitution and the Bible. Jones' constitutional brigade is right to remind people that laws meant to regulate everyone's behaviour are being ignored by the few who regard themselves above the rule of law. But his stance as an "aggressive constitutionalist" is akin to the zealous worship with which his fundamentalist Christian neighbours treat the Bible. While these documents have educational value for understanding history, they have long been turned into tools of propaganda. The indoctrination surrounding them has transformed them into idols of worship for people whose moral exo-skeleton requires them to place faith in an order of values that lies far beyond their control. Just as monothesitic religions offer a pseudo-morality to those who need to be told by society to keep on the straight and narrow path, so a cult of ignorance has grown up around the US Constitution as the fount of American civic wisdom.

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© Unknown
My point is not to demean the value of having a social charter by which all can abide, but to highlight the inherent flaw of rallying around a document that means nothing to psychopaths whose worldview lies entirely beyond its boundaries. People can agree that there are minimal rights granted them by nature. But if they do not take into account the existence of their intra-species predator - the psychopath - and fast recognise how their emotional investment in a moral order that is not their own disempowers them, their good intentions will be rendered into their opposite by the laws of ponerogenesis - the infection and spread of evil.

As noted, Jones is a gun enthusiast and has spent a lot of energy whipping up support for the maintenance of the right to bear arms in the USA. While he may not have (yet) explicitly said so, it is quite clear that his message is that "Obama's socialist dictatorship" must be resisted by US citizens by force of arms.

What's implied here is the dangerous notion that by remaining armed they present a strategic problem to the powers that be, who could never subvert them against their will so long as they remain armed. It's the kind of MAD paranoia that emanated from the Military-Industrial Complex down throughout society in the Cold War era: so long as we maintain a stockpile of nuclear weapons, the Soviets will never attack us because we would react and everybody could be certain of only one thing: mutually assured destruction (MAD). The important difference between resisting government by force of arms and the cold war is that, in any shoot out between armed citizens and the US military, the citizens will always lose.

The suggestive threat of violence is ever present in both Jones' manner and words. He hints of bloody revolution at the beginning of one of his blockbusters (appropriately called Endgame), with a quote from HG Wells:
Countless people will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it.
This is precisely where paranoid characters come in. Standing in front of the Bilderberg meeting in Canada in 2006, Jones grandstands the following through his customary bullhorn:
God is on our side. I stand before the creator of the universe and I ask the creator of the universe, as our founding fathers did in 1776 to lead, guide and direct us and to give us the power and the foresight and the understanding and the will to stand against your entire agenda, including your final plan of world population reduction of 80% that Henry Kissinger penned in 1973. Why do you put mercury in the vaccines? [inaudible] sodium fluoride in the water? Why? Why do you put cancer viruses in the vaccines? Why have you used depleted uranium now in four separate nations? You're arrogant. You have the sickness that elites have had throughout history in their figurative and in some cases literal ivory towers. You believe that you're invincible. You will and you are failing now. Your New World Order will fall. Humanity will defeat you. The answer to 1984 is 1776.
1776. What happened in 1776? There was violent revolution in the soon-to-be USA.One that by no means 'freed' the people.

Jones has got a deep religious fundamentalist connection - not least with one Texe Marrs, who sees in every event the prophecy of biblical Revelations - he's a gun totin' "survivalist". Do people actually think that he's going to use outright lies to attract followers? Of course not! He's going to hit every emotional button he can in a whole lot of people who are disenfranchised, downwardly adjusted, and frustrated as heck.

The "9/11 Truth Movement" - vested in the flag, the constitution, guns and Christianity - is being married with the "Moral Majority" - also vested in the flag, guns and Sarah Palin, whose Army of God is bent on establishing a totalitarian theocracy before the coming of their messiah - to form a front of revved up avengers on a crusade to defend their beliefs from crumbling as history brings us closer to reality. It's an impossible challenge of course, but their determination to hold onto their idols is unyielding and threatening to corral their followers into the trap set for the American people.

Alex Jones and Sarah Palin; now there's a marriage made in heaven! An interesting footnote to this is Jones' alleged membership of a fundamentalist Christian church (now disbanded) called Remnant Saints Inter-Continental Congress. Its motto was: Toward the Establishment of the Government of God on Earth. Jones denied ever being a member, although the church disputed this.

Ponerization

From his earliest days ranting on Austin's public access tv network, Jones has understood the importance of ratings. It doesn't matter what people say about you, so long as the camera is on you.

The attention fostered on Jones creates the impression in those amenable to his material that he is The Messenger, where in fact he becomes the pied piper of extremist truth-seeking who by association brands all those who seek to understand the societal re-ordering humanity that is undergoing as suffering from mental illness.

There is in fact a psychological disorder at play here. Political Ponerology has this to say about the young angry white males that laud Jones' pathological behaviour and purchase his DVDs because it's more in line with their TV culture where reading was never worth the effort:
If various circumstances combine, including a given society's deficient psychological worldview, individuals are forced to exercise functions which do not make full use of his or her talents. When this happens, said person's productivity is no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents. Such an individual then feels cheated and inunndated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be. Such a person always knows if his social and professional adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may "fix on" an unfair world where "all you need is power". Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward social adaptations. It is in society's best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies. [...]

Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly ultilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution.
Jones' "truth movement" bears many of the symptoms of what Lobaczewski and his fellow researchers so accurately described as a ponerogenic union:
One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic way. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people. The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.
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© Unknown
The American people are in danger of being taken over by the process of ponerization even more than they already have because of the unravelling of safety nets and institutions. Pensions are disappearing, unemployment is increasing, the financial system may collapse, the housing market is falling apart and cities are crumbling as public utilities are sold off and disaster capitalism devours what's left of the public domain.

Conditions are certainly ripe in the US for a pied piper to vector all that rage generated by the psychopaths in power in a way that ultimately endangers all who work to educate their fellow countrymen and women.
The earlier phase of the union's activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process.

Any human group affected by the process [of ponerization] is characterized by its increasing regression as regards natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone treating this in traditional categories could consider it an instance of "turning into half-wittedness" or the growing of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings.

Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure characterized by corresponding paralogical and paramoral elements, as expected.
In other words, the group begins to behave no differently than the establishment against which it rails - in this case, the US government.

Paranoid character disorders:
It is characteristic of paranoid behavior for people to be capable of relatively correct reasoning and discussion as long as the conversation involves minor differences of opinion. This stops abruptly when the partner's arguments begin to undermine their overvalued ideas, crush their long-held stereotypes of reasoning, or force them to accept a conclusion they had subconsciously rejected before.

Such a stimulus unleashes upon the partner a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion.

Utterances like these inspire aversion among cultivated and logical people, but they enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, who were earlier the objects of the egotistical influence of individuals with character disorders, and in particular a large part of the young.

A [working class person] may perceive this to be a kind of victory over higher-class people and thus take the paranoid person's side. However, this is not the normal reaction among the common people, where perception of psychological reality occurs no less often than among intellectuals.

In sum then, the response of accepting paranoid argumentation is qualitatively more frequent in reverse proportion to the civilization level of the community in question, although it never approaches the majority.

Nevertheless, paranoid individuals become aware of their enslaving influence through experience and attempt to take advantage thereof in a pathologically egotistic manner.

Political Ponerology - Andrej Lobaczewski
Does that remind you of anyone?

The Secret Team and COINTELPRO

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© Raw Story
In order to prevent humanity from seeing how their pathological influence has coloured everything, the powers that be have manoeuvered voices like Jones into positions of visibility. In doing so, they effectively ordained him "Minister of Truth" over a flock of "Truthers", and whose church is the "9/11 Truth Movement." These terms of reference did not come out of nowhere. They were chosen for the dual purpose of vectoring genuine truth seekers to dead ends, where anger hype and paranoia endlessly stress the seeker and those around him or her, and to facilitate the mainstream media's task of branding those who ask questions of authority and the true nature of reality as insane.

I find it interesting that Jones is now lambasting his "attackers" as "George Soros funded". There's no reason to think Jones was aware that this smear tactic has already been used to defame people when he recently employed it in his defense, but it is suggestive of some kind of meme floating around that certain pathological types readily absorb and use to their advantage.

The way Alex Jones presents himself has a great deal to do with his inflated ego. However, that is not the only factor. The media attention he is getting is in many ways quite bewildering until one digs deeper and understands that this happens for a reason. Web sites and individuals that legitimately seek the truth are ignored and suppressed. Web sites and individuals that serve a useful purpose are supported and championed.

The strategy of supporting sides that at first glance appear to be in direct opposition is similar to the way things are staged by the Secret Team. L Fletcher Prouty described in great detail how the flow of information is successfully managed by a few hands to produce precisely the reaction the Powers That Be require from their unwitting targets. The best minds running government departments and the best journalists reporting events can be supplied information in a fashion and style tailored specifically for them because the 'Secret Team' knows they will respond to specific information. They know each response because they know every detail about a public person's life and thus have psychological profiles that tell them exactly how that person is programmed to think. Now consider that if they can maneuver presidents, generals and technocrats - men and women at the top of their game in public office - to function just how they want them to function, how difficult would it be for them to micromanage someone as brash and easily exploitable as Alex Jones?

We at Sott.net cannot emphasise enough that people read Prouty's works in order to gauge the sophistication of a system of information control that is always several steps ahead of the players. The Secret Team now sits atop a gargantuan reaction machine, developed over decades of counter-intelligence programs [COINTELPRO]. It is our experience that cool heads are required to counter some of the negative effects of its mind games. Reactionary individuals only contribute to improving the machine's efficiency.

Over the years we have made clear our opinion that there is good reason to suspect that Alex Jones is part of a COINTELPRO operation. What people fail to understand however is that serious COINTELPRO operations are never obviously COINTELPRO. They are by definition very closely aligned with that which they seek to subvert and destroy because they would not get very far at infiltration and subversion if they were not. The fact that Alex Jones is an outspoken critic of government and that he exposes all manner of hidden government agendas cannot be taken as evidence that he is not COINTELPRO. In fact, in the crazy world of government agents and agencies, when taken along with other evidence, the fact that Jones exposes government schemes - and extraordinarily loudly at that - becomes evidence that he may well be COINTELPRO. Please note that the important part of that last sentence is "when taken along with other evidence", some of which I outlined above. To come to a decision on the honest intentions (or otherwise) of Jones and his ilk, we must look for more subtle clues and one of the most useful barometers are the fruits of his labor.

Alex Jones' infowars.com bio awards him the mantle of "grandfather of the 9/11 Truth movement". Watch the following clips and decide for yourself whether Alex Jones is a man who seeks Truth or an agent of hate:


Still undecided? Wait, there's more:


Update: Need one more? Consider this, the first of a 3-part video with Alex Jones posing as "the joker" complete with scary make-up and a deranged laugh. Does anyone really want to associate themselves with this type of mentality?


The fact of the matter is that the current economic crisis in the US and the continuing imposition of a global police state, led by the forces of the American empire, are but two of the very serious problems that face humanity today, and Jones and most other alleged truth-seekers seem content to focus only on the superficial aspects of those problems. We will have to wait and see the fate of those hooked on the alternative-media-pied-pipers' tune. In the meantime, Sott.net has, and always will play our own tune as we look deeper to uncover the many layers that lie beneath the surface. We ask that those of you who have ears... to listen.