Clairvoyance, the Conspiracist, and Facebook

Who profits off of disinformation anyway?

“If what I’m saying is true, you’re in the same mess I’m in. If the world is collapsing down on me, it’s collapsing down on you as well.” — Alex Jones, quoted in “Dark Star: Alex Jones,” Austin American-Statesman, November 27, 1997.

I often keep tabs on all of the people who claim that they saw 9/11 coming. I don’t know that they necessarily knew it was coming, but I do know that they want me to know that they saw it coming.

My favorite recent example? Prince Andrew’s ex Lady Victoria Hervey who claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was in on 9/11. Here’s the relevant tabloid mention:

According to Lady Victoria’s Instagram Story on Thursday, not only did Epstein know about the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers before they happened, but he even allegedly bought plane tickets “as souvenirs” of the horrifying and heartbreaking national tragedy.

“Regarding 9/11 which I’ll touch more on tomorrow, I have a story that connects it to Epstein,” she wrote on the social media platform. “As in he knew it was going to happen and so did his close circle. They even bought plane tickets as souvenirs and never got on the planes. This is a whole new level of Sick.”

Woah.

If you know something is coming, you can claim to have “predicted” it when, in fact, you knew it was coming all along.

Once the deed happens, this “prediction” makes you look clairvoyant and builds your mystique accordingly. Whenever you are attacked in the future, your defenders can point back to you and say, “Well, he got that one right…” You get more points the truer your “predictions” turn out to be. In the last few years I’ve come to believe that many of the “predictions” are, in fact, conspiracies by another name. If called out — which rarely happens — you can just claim that you are just guessing man.

And when we are talking conspiracies, we are talking about the underworld where organized crime and the intelligence community dwell. This is the “deep politics” which the late Kevin Coogan recounts in his book, The Spy Who Would Be Star: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground (2021). (I’ll review that book a little later.)

We try to keep the “deep politics” out of everyday life, but it finds its way in through the latest technology having been kept out by all the gatekeepers whose chief job is to keep it all out. Indeed, for all of our hopes and dreams of a technological age, we forget that all technology means is the ability to do more with less.

We challenge these crazy moments brought about by the deep politics by proposing a state of exception but it has already won by changing our way of life. Naturally we pretend we didn’t change anything at all. What’s on Netflix?

It was not supposed to enable this kind of thing, of course. Technology is supposed to be about liberation, don’t you know, not about control and certainly not about fomenting disorder. Facebook was supposed to connect the world and not addict grandma to Q Anon. I think we underestimate the degree to which the “deep politics” develops technology, and that’ll be a subject to which I’ll return in the not too distant future. For now, what’s important to understand is that this interplay between the mob and the intel world may be precisely how all things really do happen in our otherwise hum drum existence.

How often are oligarchs targeted by the SEC — only to invest in projects that the deep state wants? How routine are the sorts of deals that are struck between compromised billionaires and the IRS?

Conspiracy theories are exciting and for a lot of their adherents, the entertainment value alone is enough. Real life is dreadfully boring, after all. It’s precisely by entertaining that the conspiracist drives his first views.

There are these moments, though, where things peer through as is, where the deep politics take hold and reigns supreme if only for that moment before we are all told to go shopping again either in the mall (George W. Bush) or over the web.

What could be more American than mindlessly consuming?

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A clip from July 25, 2001 where Alex Jones “predicts” 9-11 has always bothered me. Here he is, on his local access Austin TV, discussing the terrorist attack months before they even happened.

“Who is this man?” I wonder. Where did he come from? Why is he based in Austin?

Here Jones is, age 22, mentioned in the page of the Austin American-Statesman, while he promises to expose the mass media.

And here he is delivering “Reality Check”…

Jones was quoted in The Austin Chronicle about those days on ACTV, “I just think access is so damn important. Access is the best thing about Austin. If someone watching doesn't like what they see, wait a minute and it will be something completely different, or they can come down and get a show.”

Why was Austin important for the project? Because it’s a very important place for the intelligence community. No less an authority than The Austin Chronicle described as an effort to recruit students at the University of Texas-Austin in 2004. Austin recently hosted the CIA’s first ever resident intelligence officer.

(One wonders why the Chisraeli University of Austin got funded anyway. )

The unofficial motto of Austin is keep Austin weird and the University of Texas-Austin is a weird place, man, made all the stranger by its ties to the intelligence world.

When I was working Clearview and studying the history of facial recognition, I learned that the CIA funded a lot of the initial work for Woody Bledsoe at the University of Texas-Austin. (See generally, Shaun Raviv’s excellent piece on the history of facial recognition for Wired Magazine.)

One of the ways to spot intelligence asset is to pay attention to what they are really doing. Could Jones have been promoting so many conspiracies around Austin in order to get the crazies corralled and following his script? Or was Jones just really nuts and being used for someone else’s objective? Who, in other words, is Jones’s handler? Or is he just a ramble rouser? A provocateur? Does it matter?

Jon Stewart used to play this game: “I’m just a comedian,” he’d say when cornered. OK but there are still responsibilities that come with being the court jester. It’s not as if there aren’t comedians who are also plugged into foreign intelligence. Sacha Baron Cohen comes to mind.

I suspect that’s why Jon Stewart ceased to be funny and became moralistic. He’s now working for Apple pushing the woke agenda — an agenda which seeks to divide the United States and which are increasingly anti-science.

Apple purportedly signed a $275 billion with China. Some portion of that money goes to Jon Stewart, naturally, and Stewart continues to push divisive anti-white racism.

In much the same way as Stewart, Alex Jones seems to have been propped by those who seek division. He purportedly made $800,000 a day (though he disputes that that’s a regular thing).

A jury punished Jones with a $40 million plus judgment. Having met Jones, I doubt he has that kind of money. So long, Infowars!

And yet the families aren’t getting anything from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Take away Jones’s access, and you strip him from his audience.

So yes, there’s a responsibility that these platforms have in perpetuating Jones’s defamation. Indeed social media companies have become a kind of defamation engine and they’ll continue to lead to our divisive politics until they are reined in by some much needed legislative reform. This means overturning Section 230 which has given the tech companies a de facto monopoly to profit off of the worst, most divisive trends in our politics.

It doesn’t seem right. There should be accountability to those who pushed the defamation far and wide and profited off of it. And it should begin with, not end with Alex Jones.

The tech companies argue that they are just a highway that people drive on and that they have no responsibility for how the road is designed. They say that the drivers, if bad actors, are using their highways to drive poorly. Tech companies never admit that their algorithms promote bad drivers much to the detriment of everyone else on the road. It’s time to have highway patrol, funded by taxes on the big tech companies.

The Chinese understand that without controlling social media they risk losing control of their state. And indeed, the lesson of the Arab Spring is that social media risks destabilizing governments all over the world.

Do we get that we, too, can be toppled?