What If Alex Jones Suffered a Fatal Heart Attack?
May 11, 2012
Let's assume that Alex Jones could conceivably suffer a heart attack and die.
What would the headlines say? In what outlets? On which page in which newspapers? I can think of a few.
"Conspiracy Theorist Suffers Heart Attack.""Noted Conspiracy Theorist Suffers Heart Attack."
"Far Right Conspiracy Theorist Suffers Heart Attack."
"Alex Jones Was 'Breitbarted,' Says Conspiracy Theorist."
"City Coroner Retires Unexpectedly, Cites Family Reasons."
How crucial is Jones? These questions occur to me.
Six months after his death, how many clicks would his site get?Could anyone replace him in terms of audience size?
Would there be another comparable clearing house site?
Would his targets experience less exposure?
Would certain men breathe easier?
Would the conservative fringe be decapitated?
Would anything change, one way or another?
And the key question: "Where would I get tipped off for my daily stories?"
I have been in the conservative movement since 1956. I have watched men come and go. Jones is the best of the conspiracy theorists, ever. He has the largest audience. He sniffs out the widest range of stories. He connects dots better than most, given the number of dots he tries to connect. He does not get off message. He has avoided scandals. And he is by far the best bull horn guy in the business.
He has retained his sanity. This is not a minor issue. There have been some real nut cases in this movement. Sherman Skolnick was one. So was Peter Beter. You could not trust anything they wrote. When you delve too deeply into the world of inner rings, you can begin to believe that they really are in charge. But life is too complex for any group of conspirators to be in charge. (See Psalm 2.)
Jones trusts the good sense of the common man. This is his version of the Austrian economists' theory of the wisdom of the free market. Austrians say that lots of little people making daily decisions are smarter corporately than any central planning board. Jones believes this regarding politics.
He is going to die. If I were Jones, I would set aside time to think about what my legacy would be a year after my death. Five years. Ten years.
I would pay attention to the crucial issue of succession.
Dan Smoot didn't. I knew him in his retirement years. He was a very smart man. He had a TV presence that few men ever had. He would have been a master of YouTube. But he left no trace.
Neither did Gary Allen, the co-author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy. (Larry Abraham co-authored the initial hardback edition.) He was my friend. I spoke at his funeral. He did good work. He was relentless. But his paperback books are mostly out of print. His American Opinion articles are not online. (American Opinion is not online -- a huge mistake.)
Neither did Larry Abraham. We co-authored Call It Conspiracy in 1986.
Neither did Don Bell. You have probably never heard of Don Bell. He was the grand master of conspiracy journalists. He discovered the Council on Foreign Relations a dozen years before Dan Smoot did: in 1948. He discovered Quigley's Tragedy and Hope (1966) within weeks of its release. Don Bell Report was the original distribution notice of that book. He has left no trace. This was deliberate. I conducted the only interview anyone ever did with him. I recorded it. His wife, who literally had lost her mind and who lived in constant fear, told him to take the tape away from me before I left. I never saw him again.
Neither did Hilaire du Berrier, whose H du B Reports did more than any other newsletter to chronicle the creation of the European Union, for over 40 years. I have a CD-ROM of the entire set. Maybe five other people have a copy. Yet no one who is not an insider could write an accurate history of Western Europe, 1960 to 2000, if he had not read these reports.
This is the sad fate of most journalists. They are contemporary. After they die, they are soon forgotten. Their very contemporaneity is their Achilles' heel.
I think of the great Chicago columnist, Mike Royko. He wrote an article a day. He created a classic figure, Slats Grobnick. He left no trace.
I write 9 articles a day, minimum. Most are short. They keep people informed or amused. They are bubbles on the surface of a fast-moving stream. Any long-term impact will come from my books. I assume that several of my 60+ volumes will survive. The Web will keep them visible. Search engines will find them. I now have to do at least 2,000 videos. I love the Web.
If I were Jones, I would do the following.
1. Name a successor in the corporate minutes.2. Train him.
3. Get him on YouTube as a back-up man.
4. Videotape a public legacy: short video, plus longer ones.
5. These videos would call the cadre to action.
6. Create a series of videos on The Big Picture: past & present.
7. Use this as the training tool.
8. Create a program to show local people to create sites.
9. Use these as legally autonomous distribution sites.
10. Create a local activist training program: how to take over your county.
11. Write Powers Behind the Thrones: 12 Invisible People Who Made Our World Worse.
12. Write Legacy: Ten Things You Can Do to Leave the World a Better Place.
13. Write How the World Really Works.
14. Write After the Crash: Laying the Foundations of a Better World Order
All this should be done because it needs to be done. He could do it.
The sooner this is ready to go, the less loss his audience would suffer in the aftermath of his demise.
Put differently, the payoff would increase on his side of the ledger, and the payoff would decline on a different ledger (or ledgers).