How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  […]

  Imagine how bad she smells, man? I’m told her and Obama, just stink, stink, stink, stink. You can’t wash that evil off, man. Told there’s a rotten smell around Hillary. I’m not kidding, people say, they say—folks, I’ve been told this by high up folks. They say listen, Obama and Hillary both smell like sulfur. I never said this because the media will go crazy with it, but I’ve talked to people that are in protective details, they’re scared of her. And they say listen, she’s a frickin’ demon and she stinks and so does Obama. I go, like what? Sulfur. They smell like Hell.6

  In other words, Jones peddles weapons-grade nut jobbery—but he is promoted by one of the most heavily trafficked websites in the country and may have played a key role in the 2016 presidential campaign. Jones has claimed that he has 5 million daily listeners of his radio shows, which he simulcasts on his website and extends through his YouTube channel. During the campaign, Trump appeared on Jones’s show and lavished praise on the conspiracy theorist. “Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones in a December 2015 appearance.7 “I think Alex Jones may be the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media,” says Trump whisperer Roger Stone, who describes the conspiracy theorist as “a valuable asset” who will “rally the people around President Trump’s legislative program.”8 (During a child custody hearing in 2017, Jones’s lawyer insisted that the host was “playing a character,” describing him as “a performance artist.” Jones himself disputed those characterizations.)9 On the Monday after the election, Donald Trump called Jones to thank him for his support in the campaign. The newly elected president promised Jones he would return to his show, a pledge that the Washington Post called “an extraordinary gesture for an incoming president whose schedule is packed with calls from world leaders and the enormous task of overseeing the transition.”10

  Even more extraordinary was the fact that the leader of the free world actually paid attention to this guy.

  THE DRUDGE-JONES NEXUS

  By 2013, the year that Drudge once proclaimed would be the “year of Alex Jones,” the Drudge Report had become a powerful online conduit for Jones’s conspiracy theories. In mid-2011, the Drudge Report featured the link to a story about Texas governor Rick Perry, who was then mulling a presidential bid: “Infowars.com: Bilderberg Approved Perry Set to Become GOP Frontrunner.” The first paragraph of the piece was vintage Jones:

  Every indication suggests that Bilderberg-approved Texas Governor Rick Perry is set to become the front runner in the Republican race to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency, illustrating once again how a shady, secretive and undemocratic global elite holds the reigns [sic] of true power while Americans are distracted by the delusional notion that they have a genuine choice in 2012. [Emphasis added.]11

  The rant captured Jones’s paranoid worldview, questioning whether the electoral process had become a fraud, and positing the existence of a vast and dark global conspiracy in language that would make an appearance on the presidential campaign trail in 2016. A contributor to the conservative blog RedState noted that this was apparently not the first time Drudge had linked to “that charlatan Alex Jones,” but warned that “Drudge loses credibility by linking such crap on his site.”12

  But the Drudge-Jones relationship was actually ramping up. In a 2011 interview with New York magazine, Jones credited Drudge with helping to supercharge Infowars. Jones told the magazine, “If you had to say there was one source who really helped us break out, who took our information, helped to punch it out to an even more effective level, he’s the guy.” He continued, “Three years ago, there was almost no news coverage of Bilderberg [an elite conference] in this country; there was an electronic Berlin Wall. Drudge, every year, takes our reportage and links to it on our site.”13

  Jones also noted that it was “intensifying how much he links to us and promotes us.” During the 2010 Christmas season, for example, all of the links on the Drudge Report were turned green, except links to Infowars, which Drudge published in red. “It was like a Christmas present,” says Jones.

  By April 2013, an analysis by the left-wing organization Media Matters found that Drudge had linked to Jones at least 244 different times since 2011, including 50 so far in 2013:

  Among the fifty Infowars pieces promoted by Drudge so far in 2013: a story mulling over claims that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have been “surreptitiously” given cancer, possibly by the U.S. government; numerous articles promoting conspiracies about supposedly ominous ammunition purchases made by the Department of Homeland Security; and a story comparing Obama to “other tyrants”—including Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—that have “used kids as props.”14

  But this was relatively modest stuff. Among the stories that Drudge had specifically highlighted, Media Matters for America found:

  —A November 2012 article promoting claims that James Holmes, the man currently on trial for the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, may actually have been under the influence of CIA “mind control.” The piece was based around a story told by an “alleged inmate” supposedly in jail with Holmes, who claimed Holmes told him he was “programmed” to kill by an “evil” therapist.

  —A July 2012 post highlighting an interview between Jones and Joseph Farah, editor of conspiracy website World Net Daily (WND). During that interview, Farah suggested that if Obama were reelected, people like him and Jones would be “hunted down like dogs.”

  —A March 2012 piece suggesting that the death of conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart may not have been the result of natural causes, but instead related to a “damning” video about President Obama Breitbart had supposedly planned to release the day of his death.

  —An April 2011 article responding to President Obama’s release of his long-form birth certificate headlined, “New Obama Birth Certificate is a Forgery.” The story states: “Our investigation of the purported Obama birth certificate released by Hawaiian authorities today reveals the document is a shoddily contrived hoax. Infowars.com computer specialists dismissed the document as a fraud soon after examining it.”15

  During this same period, Drudge also regularly promoted stories from World Net Daily, which trafficked heavily in stories questioning Obama’s birth certificate. But the relationship with Jones was more personal and, over time, troubling. Or at least it should have been troubling for others in the conservative media. In actuality, though, only a few online commentators chided Drudge—and did so mildly. “I’d love it if Drudge report stopped linking to Infowars,” said one.16 But there is no indication that Drudge suffered any significant backlash or loss of influence from his advocacy for Jones and his bizarre worldview.

  A 2015 interview of Drudge on Jones’s show revealed the depths of the two men’s mutual admiration. Jones admitted he was “star-struck” by seeing Drudge in person, while Drudge lavished the conspiracy theorist with praise:

  You’re a romantic figure, Alex, in Americana. It’s romantic what you do here every day. It just is. This is romance. Because you’re an American standing up, tough, facing these headwinds. Wow are they blowing. But you’re there. And you’re not alone. Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, Levin. There’s a lot of people on the airwaves who are as brave. They are brave, and they are living it. I’ve met ’em all. I’m friends with them all. They are also operating against the grain in an America that needs to go back to that.17

  CNN’s Dylan Byers wrote that the forty-five-minute interview “oscillated wildly between familiar critiques of the establishment and paranoid conspiracy theories with little basis in reality. At one point, Drudge suggested that the Obama administration came up with the name ‘ISIS’—for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—because it sounded like the last name of Rep. Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.”18

  The two men also discussed an issue that would come to prominence in the 2016 campaign: Hillary Clinton’s health. During that campaign, as p
art of their advocacy for Trump, both Drudge and Jones would relentlessly push various conspiracy theories about Clinton, which they foreshadowed in the 2015 interview.

  DRUDGE: You’ve got to be the greatest you can be. Now. Now. Before this country is so completely altered and we’re left with Hillary’s brain in the Oval Office in a jar. ’Cuz that’s what we’re getting. She is old and she’s sick. She is not a contender. They’re making her a contender with these propped up Saturday Night Live things. It’s like a head on a stick.19

  THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA

  In retrospect, Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” seems eerily prescient.20 Some conservatives have dismissed Hofstadter’s argument as a slander of the conservative movement and, indeed, he seemed to be describing the culture of the fringe that was excommunicated during the Buckley-era purges. But rereading it in the age of Trump reminds us that the Right has harbored some darker impulses for decades.

  The lengthy piece, which appeared in Harper’s magazine, created a sensation when it was published in the midst of the Johnson-Goldwater campaign. Hofstadter, a professor of history at Columbia University, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book in 1964. The essay was adapted from a lecture he had delivered at Oxford University in November 1963. In his lecture and the subsequent essay, Hofstadter described the culture, mind-set, and tactics of what he saw as a new style of paranoid politics in the United States.

  The paranoid spokesman, he wrote, saw the world “in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” He quoted John Birch Society’s Robert Welch’s warning in 1951: “Time is running out. Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.” (As we’ll see later, this style of urgent rhetoric became characteristic of the argument that the 2016 election was an end-of-the-world “binary choice.”)

  At the center of the paranoid worldview, wrote Hofstadter, was an “appeal to a lost America,” a sense on the Right that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” His description could easily have been applied to Donald Trump (or the Tea Party) fifty years later:

  The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.21

  Since the situation is so dire and the stakes so high, the paranoid spokesman is not interested in half-measures. “He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician,” Hofstadter wrote, describing what would become the Right’s cycle of disappointment. “This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.”

  All the while, he wrote, the paranoid was striving to create an alternative reality, piling up documentation and evidence to back even its most outlandish fantasies. “The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique,” he wrote. He noted that Robert Welch’s attack on Dwight Eisenhower, The Politician, had one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. “The entire right-wing movement of our time,” Hofstadter wrote in 1964, “is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.” The distinctive characteristic of the “evidence” collected by the paranoid was that it was gathered as ammunition to prove a preexisting point rather than any sort of a search for actual truth. “The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world,” Hofstadter argued, “but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.”22

  In recent years, Hofstadter’s essay has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. In 2010, for example, a writer in Salon noted that “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” reads “like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid’s ‘quality of pedantry’ and ‘heroic strivings for ‘evidence,’ embodied in Beck’s chalkboard and piles of books.… Is it any wonder, then, that a growing number of Americans insist on believing that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim?”23

  “CHRISTIANITY’S CRAZY UNCLE”

  Even after the excommunication of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, this sort of virulent paranoid strain remained alive, including in the newly resurgent religious Right, which proved to be fertile ground for some of the fruitier theories. For decades one of its most prominent figures, Pat Robertson, trafficked in conspiracy theories, sharing with his audience warnings about schemes by the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jewish bankers to impose a Satanic “New World Order.”

  Within the rising Christian Right, Robertson was a hugely influential figure; he had founded the Christian Broadcast Network in 1960 and expanded his domain to include Regent University (formerly CBN University), the American Center for Law and Justice, and a network of radio, television, and print outlets. Robertson parlayed his prominence into a GOP presidential bid in 1988, finishing strongly in Iowa and winning in Washington, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii. In 1989, he helped launch the Christian Coalition, an organization that would have an enormous impact on Republican politics.

  Even as his influence grew, however, Robertson developed a reputation for cringe-inducing commentary on current events. In a 1985 book, he wondered, “Are credit cards associated with the mark of the beast?” Robertson also repeatedly suggested that a variety of disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, were actually God’s punishments. He attributed the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to a centuries-old deal in which Haitians “swore a pact to the devil.”24 In 2006, he suggested that a stroke suffered by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon might have been punishment for Sharon’s decision to disengage from Gaza. “God has enmity against those who, quote ‘divide my land,’” Robertson declared. “And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.” The 1995 assassination of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was, Robertson said, “the same thing.”25

  Robertson’s comments earned a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League:

  It is outrageous and shocking, but not surprising, that Pat Robertson once again has suggested that God will punish Israel’s leaders for any decision to give up land to the Palestinians. His remarks are un-Christian and a perversion of religion. Unlike Robertson, we don’t see God as cruel and vengeful.

  We would hope that good Christian leaders would distance themselves from Pat Robertson’s remarks. It is pure arrogance for Robertson to suggest that he has divine knowledge of God’s intent and purpose based on his interpretation of scripture.

  After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans, Robertson implied that America had brought the tragedy on itself. “We have insulted God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why does this happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us.”26

  Jerry Falwell Sr., the founder of the Moral Majority, echoed his remarks in an appearance on Robertson’s television show, The 700 Club, suggesting that gays, abortion-rights supporters, and liberal civil-
rights activists shared the blame for the horrific attacks: “[T]he pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America,” Falwell continued, “I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

  “Well, I totally concur,” responded Robertson.27

  But Robertson achieved peak crackpottery with the publication in 1991 of his book The New World Order, a comprehensive anthology of paranoid fever dreams.28 In the book, one reviewer noted, Robertson claimed to be revealing “a global conspiracy, stretching back centuries and financed by Jewish bankers, all aimed at the formation of a one-world dictatorship. The brains behind this conspiracy, Robertson said, was Satan, who at that time was working through his unwitting patsy, President George H. W. Bush.” The goal of this vast scheme was to create “a one-world government, a one-world army, a one-world economy under an Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy, and a world dictator served by a council of twelve faithful men.”29 Among Christian conservatives, the book became an immense bestseller, even making the New York Times bestseller list.

  Author Daniel Pipes explained Robertson’s thesis:

  This tyranny will attempt to “destroy the Christian faith” and “replace it with an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship.” In another place, he foresees nothing less than a world under “the domination of Lucifer and his followers” in which spiritual forces will be set into motion “which no human being will be strong enough to contain.” Robertson offers Hitler’s attempts at world hegemony as the closest historical parallel to the “giant prison” of the New World Order.30

  Robertson told his followers that this immense international conspiracy was secretly manipulated by the secretive Order of the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, Jewish bankers. Robertson was later subjected to harsh criticism for citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic bit of fake history to make his case.31 In his defense, Robertson echoed the paranoid activists described by Hofstadter, insisting that his book had been meticulously researched and documented, claims that were quickly debunked.32