A recent article on Sott.net about Alex Jones' possible negative influence on a man who shot three policemen in the US last week has generated some interesting commentary from readers and brought into sharp focus a question that goes right to the heart of the problems facing humanity today.

The article in question by Max Blumenthal of Alternet states that the 22-year-old gunman Richard Poplawski "was a neo-Nazi wannabe who railed against blacks, Jews, Zionists and gun control" and also seemed to find common ideological ground with Alex Jones. Poplawski appears to have been particularly incensed by Jones' reports that Obama was planning to institute a socialist dictatorship wherein all guns would be outlawed. While grouping Jones with White Supremacist Neo-Nazis may be doing the thing too brown, it is true that Jones has repeatedly stated that "the first step in establishing a dictatorship is to disarm the citizens."

One Sott.net reader commented on the article:
What an infantile thread. Alex Jones is a Champion. That SOTT would endorse some false blame on Alex Jones for the act of a cop killer is pathetic.

Judge a man by his fruits. AJ fruit output far exceeds anything SOTT could ever achieve.

Is it intellectual snobbery or jealously? (sic)

Should we blame Pink Floyd for truancy from "The Wall"? Should we blame SOTT for Anti Semitism? No.

Get a grip and get behind Alex Jones. Less of the Celestial esoteric stuff and more of the day-to-day nitty gritty.

SOTT is nowhere in the league of Alex Jones. SOTT has pushed the line AJ is COINTELPRO yet has not a morsel of proof of anything.

I'll continue to follow and support SOTT but you're just not in Alex Jones' class.
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". To come to a decision on the honest intentions (or otherwise) of Jones and his ilk, we must look for more subtle clues and, as our reader above says, the fruits of his labor.

While one of the the fruits of Jones' labor may be increased awareness and suspicion of government intentions among certain members of the public, this is not enough to establish his credentials as an honest broker; we must look at precisely where Jones is directing this new found popular awareness and to what use it may ultimately be put.

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 stated it directly, it is quite clear that his message is that Obama's "socialist dictatorship" must be resisted by US citizens by force of arms. It is rather disturbing that many supporters of Alex Jones who supposedly see the significant progress towards police states that has been made in Western nations over the past 10 years (most notably in the US) cannot also see just how dangerous it is for anyone in the alternative news community to be extolling the virtues of an armed US citizenry confronting a police state. (And that's not even to mention the fact that Socialism is the ostensible bogeyman as it was for the Nazis of Hitler's Germany! Somehow, in the US, Socialism has come to mean something akin to Totalitarianism when all it is, when set up according to the basic ideology, is a system of government that is truly of the people, for the people, and by the people.)

Much has been written in recent years on alternative news sites and blogs about the often stark similarities between events in Nazi Germany and events in the US since 9/11; you could even say that SOTT was one of the first to draw this connection. All of the infrastructure for a true totalitarian state in the US was set up over the course of Bush's two terms. Obama has inherited that infrastructure and, whether he would like to or not, he is simply unable to change it. Contrary to popular myth, the US president is little more than a figure head. It should not be difficult to imagine what would have happened if members of the German population in the 1930's attempted to take up arms against the Nazi regime. Indeed, it seems quite obvious that one way in which a police state lock-down in the US may come to pass is if a certain number of US citizens attempt to "take back their country" by force. In such a scenario, Alex Jones would have greatly helped to achieve precisely that which he has been supposedly railing against for several years. And that dear readers is the trade mark of COINTELPRO.

Jones' totally ignorant fear-mongering about Obama's plans to establish a "Socialist dictatorship" (which comes complete with a very subtle racism that appeals to white supremacist gun lovers) and the association of Socialism with dictatorship parallels the US government and media's long-term demonisation of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. It also echoes the long-held and completely delusional American fear of being subjected to anything other than the type of Capitalist system that has in recent years been used to strip ordinary Americans of their wealth. As the unknown Dresden James put it:
The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
One has to wonder also how Jones' European supporters are able to reconcile his denunciation of Socialism when the vast majority of Europeans have enjoyed the benefits of Socialism for many decades.

Supporters of Alex Jones make much of his claim that he predicted 9/11, yet they seem incapable of the most elementary exercise of logic and discernment when they fail to question exactly HOW Jones was able to predict such an event and what his prediction suggests about his contacts and possible 'handlers'. 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.

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. Sott.net has, and always will, look deeper to uncover the many layers that lie beneath the surface.

From as early as 1994, the founder of Signs of the Times, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, via her website, Cassiopaea.org, has been predicting and sounding the alarm not only about the political skullduggery that rules the world and its coming overt manifestations (quite accurately, as it turns out), but also many other very important challenges that we face as a species, from the deeper reality of psychopaths in power that underpins the issues of corrupt government and corporations, to the very real threat from cyclic catastrophe. Where was Alex Jones back then?

It should also be noted that, while many people only now are beginning to realise that the 9/11 truth movement has been infiltrated and a set up from "day one", Sott.net has been exposing this unfortunate reality from "day one". Much of our inspiration for such predictions comes from the "celestial esoteric stuff" that our aforementioned reader dismisses and wishes we would just drop altogether. He is not the first to make such an entreaty. Several other well-known alternative news organisations have in the past offered lucrative terms of partnership on the condition that we drop the "weird stuff". Needless to say, we never have, and never will, accept such efforts to water down the Truth. We call it as we see it and we aren't for sale. If we go down, it's because the readers are no longer interested in the unvarnished "way it is."

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. The recent unfurling of the "economic crisis" for example seems very likely to be the last hurrah of the global power elite as they strip the world's population of their wealth and assets. These individuals, bankers and government and corporate big wigs, both seen and unseen, are acting like people with nothing left to lose; and that's the point. What exactly do they know that almost no one else does?

On August 17, 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by Robert S. Boyd entitled: Comets may have caused Earth's great empires to fall which included the following: (emphases, ours)
Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell apart, giving way to the periodic "dark ages'' that punctuate human history. At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world.

Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets such as the one that broke apart and smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago.

The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years, dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger, disease and death.

The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540-- at the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe -- when Earth was pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris.

In a forthcoming book, Catastrophe, the Day the Sun Went Out, British historian David Keys describes a 2-year-long winter that began in AD 535. Trees from California to Ireland to Siberia stopped growing. Crops failed. Plague and famine decimated Italy, China and the Middle East.

Keys quotes the writings of a 6th-century Syrian bishop, John of Ephesus:

"The sun became dark. ... Each day it shone for about four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow."

A contemporary Italian historian, Flavius Cassiodorus, wrote:

"We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon. We have summer without heat."

And a contemporary Chinese chronicler reported, "Yellow dust rained like snow."
Dendrochronologist, Mike Baillie, has established that:
Analysis of tree rings shows that at in 540 AD in different parts of the world the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America.

A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is claimed. There was one reference to a "comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire" in 540-41.

According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of fire. In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both Mediterranean and Chinese observers. Meteors are caused by the fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD.

[...] Famine followed the crop failures, and hard on its heels bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the mid-6th century. [...]
Now these are not the voices of evangelical, "the end of the world is nigh" types, but rather sober university professors who have spent many years in scientific research in their chosen fields. The conclusions they have come to are shocking for sure, but it behooves all of us to put aside our sacred cows for a moment and look at the facts. Over the past few years the incidence of meteorite sightings and impacts around the world has gone through the proverbial roof, as have several of the meteorites, although in the opposite direction. We have been charting these events for over 7 years and we can safely say that something is definitely 'up'.

Given the controlled nature of not only the media but also the academic world, if there was a threat to our planet from some sort of cyclical cometary shower as suggested by Ballie, Boyd and others, the chances of such information coming to general public awareness, against the wishes of the ruling elite, would be very slim. The likelihood is that our leaders would do everything within their power to conceal such information and distract those members of the public with a drive to know the Truth. As Astronomer Victor Clube wrote in his paper, The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets:
...the Christian, Islamic and Judaic cultures have all moved since the European Renaissance to adopt an unreasoning anti-apocalyptic stance, apparently unaware of the burgeoning science of catastrophes. History, it now seems, is repeating itself: it has taken the Space Age to revive the Platonist voice of reason but it emerges this time within a modern anti-fundamentalist, anti-apocalyptic tradition over which governments may, as before, be unable to exercise control. ... Cynics (or modern sophists), in other words, would say that we do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions! (emphasis in the original)
If the people that control the US government know that in the very near future the demographics and power balance on the planet are likely to be radically and unpredictably restructured by meteorite impacts, they would surely seek to prepare for such an event. Having held power for so long, their preparations would most likely center around a strategy to ensure that, when the dust settles and they emerge from their bunkers, they are able to retake control of the planet. Practically, this would involve a process of conquering as much of the planet and its resources as possible, and we note that this is essentially what successive US governments have been doing for the past 50 years. On a more local scale they would also seek to distract, confuse and disinform those people with the drive to seek answers to the most pertinent questions about life on planet earth. We humbly suggest, in this context, Alex Jones fits the profile of disinformation artist.

If there is one thing above all others that has led to the precipice upon which we currently sit as a species, it is knowledge, or the lack of it, and the fact that certain small groups of the so-called 'elite' have always sought to maintain a monopoly on it at the expense of the masses of humanity. Clearly, therefore, it is knowledge that is, and always has been, the most prized 'commodity' on this planet. Unfortunately, the catch 22 to beat them all is the fact that almost no one realises this.

Why?

Because the knowledge that knowledge is key has been deliberately and rigorously denied the masses by the propaganda of religion where "faith" and "blind belief" in the leader is the key to salvation. The salient point is that it is, and always has been, only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction.
Secret knowledge is the basis of all power. Your source of information depends upon who you are and what position you hold in society. Your source of information determines the reliability of what you know.

- Steven Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States