As Promised: 9/11 Truthers Attempting to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street

If this happens, I'll be correct and Alex Jones might have to stop writing about Occupy Wall Street (see previous post). As with so many petition-based protest movements, 9/11 deniers are attempting to hijack the Occupy Wall Street protests to forcibly insert their beliefs. Evidently they couldn't be part of the movement organically - I have yet to see any sizeable contingent of deniers actually doing any of the legwork - so conspiracy theorists need to activate their entire activist network just to try to get on the leaderboard. Link to the petition here.

So far it doesn't seem to be going very well. As of 20:00est today it has one of the highest rejection rates, at just over 25%:



which is a pretty high rate for this particularly permissive (and, by no coincidence, as-yet ineffectual) protest. One grammatically nonexistent item simply marked "Office of the Citizen" without further description only has about a 16% rejection rate, and even the particularly insipid, useless non-item "restore true democracy to the government" (which is also a historical fail, as our Founding Fathers imagined less democratic practices when it came to most things, from the election of Senators to who wasn't property) only gets rejected by about 17% of these charmers.

I think the movement is fundamentally a good idea. Its core tenants are too banal to be anything but. And here is how it could easily be destroyed. Let's see if there be skeptics among them.

Alex Jones' acolytes thunder: 'Occupy Wall Street is a Communist plot'

This weekend Prison Planet and Infowars embodied that spirit of attacking and lying about people conspiracy theorists degree with rather than actually challenging their ideas.

Between opposing popular revolutions in Libya and opposing efforts to improve standards of living around the world, Jones places himself squarely on the side of suffering on most issues. This is the statistical cost of being a reactionary: Revolutionaries need powerful friends to overthrow powerful enemies, and so every uprising becomes a "power grab" by foreigners. Technology spreads as it effectively solves daily problems, and so people become "sheeple" as they come to rely on science to make life better rather than suffer quotidian inconveniences of old. Unexpected horrors force people to realign their worldview and understanding of the world around them, and so the die-hards must assume that the enemies they're used to fighting are really at the heart of terrorist attacks, rather than the new breed of global terrorism we're really dealing with. The anti-intellectual identity forces one to constantly recode the good and the new as the cynical and the bad. Alex Jones' livelihood depends on his idiotic ideas from thirty years ago, the ones he has been parroting ever since, on being immutable and correct, and so the banal truth that there are worse entities out there than the U.S. government becomes anathema to the faith of Alex Jones.

So this week, when protestors took to the streets pointing out that democracy has a role to play in preventing future crises, Alex Jones' acolytes went into action: They branded the protestors as "puppets" and "communists." Another popular uprising Jones has to ignore, because it seeks to refute his belief that democracy doesn't work.

The lies to be rattled off feel almost too obvious: The Occupy Wall Street protestors are not employees of George Soros (I'm pretty sure he pays better, and his actual employees dress better); they are not "communists;" and so on down the line. Hell, the story on infowars on the matter links to a sign that it describes as "being held" that is just laying on the ground.

I'm not particularly fond of George Soros, Warren Buffett, or Ron Paul, so I sympathize with anyone who has difficulty picking an ideological figurehead with whom to align everyone in this debate. So here was my solution: Don't. Let their arguments stand on their own. This, of course, has thus far been much too much to ask of the Infowars crowd and its herd of unquestioning readers.

Jones has nothing useful to contribute to the financial reform protests in the US. His bloggers have randomly taken the side of both Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul, in the hopes that he can be remembered for supporting whichever side gets him more Google hits at any given time. His life is a cynical scheme designed to profit off the gullibility of his readers, and hopefully by forcing him to take a side now, he can be called on his bullshit later.

So, let's have it: Alex Jones, does government have a role to play in solving this problem, or not?