Thread by @jhamby

So I've been watching more Alex Jones nonsense to see how he's holding up now that people really are out to get him. I noticed two things:

He has a new talking point that the Internet was invented by "a psychiatrist." David Knight, who reports "news" on Infowars, says the same.

I honestly don't know what psychiatrist they could possibly be thinking of. All of the early Internet pioneers were electrical engineers or scientists, AFAIK. Mark Zuckerberg's mother's a psychiatrist and Mark took psychology classes before dropping out of Harvard.

The other thing that's going to get Infowars and Jones in trouble is that, while he's cut down on the LGBT hate, he had a long routine about seeing a kid with autism while shopping and how awful it was that the child's "cerebral cortex" had been destroyed by glyphosate, etc..

According to Jones, people with autism are in a state of permanent pain & suffering because the globalists have damaged their brains in order to derive joy from the suffering that he imagines autistic people feel all the time.

Autistic people hate to be thought of as "broken."

Lots more shilling for Alex Jones's branded supplements. He claims his pills are the best bargain because he only sells them at a 100+% markup instead of a 7x or 8x markup, as he claims his competitors do. Apparently, more herbs, more iodine, etc. make for superior snake oil.

Alex Jones's banning from YouTube & Facebook reminds me of a story from the early days of Google that I read in In The Plex by Steven Levy. In 2002, while testing a product search called Froogle, queries for "running shoes" returned a lawn gnome wearing running shoes.

YouTube & Facebook banning Alex Jones because he's too popular reminds me of this story from Steven Levy's In The Plex. While testing a product search called Froogle in 2002, Google engineers discovered a lawn gnome wearing running shoes was the top result for "running shoes."

Someone at Google "fixed the glitch" by buying the one-of-a-kind garden gnome from the vendor so that it wouldn't be for sale any more.

YouTube & Facebook's own algorithms made Alex Jones. They don't know how to fix their algorithms, so they ban Jones for being too successful.

Of course Alex Jones has the most paranoid and misguided view of the world due to his conspiratorial reading, but the algorithms and the Terms of Service can't wipe him out because he knows how to avoid crossing the line (except when he goes off about autistic or LGBT people).

I suspect that what took Jones down at YouTube was a petition from the "SJW" crowd (I hate to use that expression unironically, but it fits here) at Google, who likely used Google's automated AI transcription to find every instance of him ranting against "tr-nnies" & other slurs.

I suspect that what got Jones kicked off of iTunes and Facebook is exactly the story that played out in the papers: Tim Cook decided that Jones was no good as a podcast, and Mark Zuckerberg saw Jones as the garden gnome in the Froogle story: an unfortunately inconvenient entity.

I don't think Zuckerberg is thin-skinned enough that he cares personally that Alex Jones calls him a sociopathic robot. I think Zuckerberg was concerned that the enterprise of Facebook is being eaten away by merchants of conspiracy who think the Internet itself is an evil PSYOP.

There are a few things that interest me about how Alex Jones filters the news in order for it to fit into his worldview. The biggest irony is that he's very untrusting in general, yet he has completely fallen for Donald Trump's charm offensive and thinks he's on the side of good.

So Infowars is all about how this next election is extremely important because the Republicans need to win in order to keep the deep state and the Chi-Coms from taking over America with their globalist agenda of human enslavement. Trump is their heroic champion for America.

I'm just wondering at what point Alex Jones will break with Trump. He almost did once, when Trump fired missiles at Syria as a reaction to their chemical attack on civilians, which Jones of course believes was fake.

But that's the only break in policy Jones can think of today.

I'm very interested in this new conspiracy theory that the Internet was created by a psychiatrist (and that's bad because they're part of the big conspiracy, apparently). I can see why Infowars is popular among Scientologists. They share a deep-rooted fear of "Big Therapy."

The other factoid that Alex Jones (and David Knight, also on Infowars) keep repeating that's just not true is that the CIA put Mao Zedong in power. Here's a Quora page filled with explanations scoffing at the theory. quora.com/Was-Chairman-M…

Mao won the Chinese Civil War because his troops were better positioned to win after their truce during WWII to fight Japan. There wasn't any opportunity for the CIA to help him, and in fact they wanted the other side (who escaped to Taiwan to take over that island) to win.

If Mao had been the CIA's puppet, as Alex Jones claims, then the entire history of diplomacy and war after WWII makes no sense. For starters, President Nixon wouldn't have decided to cozy up to terrible dictators (Pakistan, Romania) to pass messages to Mao to open up diplomacy.

Nixon double-crossed some people, including Anna Chennault, a staunch Republican who helped Nixon to win the election in 1968 by helping to sabotage the Vietnamese peace talks. She later became bitter that Nixon made peace with the Chinese Communists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chen…

I think the gymnastics that Alex Jones goes through with his historical analysis that seems to start out from a Noam Chomsky-esque anti-imperialist POV is that he always shies away from an opportunity to make a Republican or a capitalist into a bad guy.

So: the CIA made Mao. 🤔

And Apple is 100% owned by the Chinese Communists. Somehow.

Anyway, Alex Jones is a garden gnome in running shoes who slipped through the very stupid filters that YouTube & Facebook are trying to set up to stop emotionally-compelling falsehoods (urban legends) from spreading.