Donald Trump Finds His Shooting-Truther Prophet
Hours before the San Bernardino attack, the GOP frontrunner sat down with professional crank Alex Jones for a meeting that was written in the stars.
thedailybeast.com
Donald Trump’s campaign, an exercise in testing the limits of the American imagination, was inevitably going to find itself advertised beside Survival Shield X-2 super-high-quality nascent iodine droplets, now 30% off, and a cylindrical vault of Survival Seeds which promise a “robust and hearty garden, even in the toughest of times,” for just $29.95.
If you were “reading the tea leaves,” as Alex Jones might say, you would’ve felt deeply in your bones that it was just a matter of time before Trump’s courting of the nation’s foremost crackpots and conspiracy theorists went mainstream. The dog whistles would transform into shouts, the winking and nodding into bear hugs.
You would’ve seen this coming, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination getting chummy with a man who would, hours later, suggest that the most recent mass shooting to terrorize the country was “suspicious” like the Sandy Hook shooting had been “suspicious.” The writing has been right there on the wall for anybody paying attention.
Trump’s bid for the White House reached this obvious apex on Wednesday afternoon, when he Skyped into the Austin-based Alex Jones Show, 60 Minutes for the tinfoil hat electorate, from his office in Trump Tower in New York City.
Alex Jones is the Hulk Hogan of conspiracy theorists. A Texas native, he is big and loud and the color of a ripe tomato. He thinks the government was involved in the Oklahoma City Bombing, the New World Order is being run by “clockwork elves,” and shrimp are suicidal because of Prozac poisoning the water supply. He is the founder of Infowars.com, the sort of publication that peddles 9/11 truther propaganda and runs headlines like, “Subliminal Super Bowl Illuminati Secrets Revealed.”
“I’ve got so many questions,” Jones, who in October endorsed Rand Paul, told Trump. “But you are vindicated—this has gotta be the 50th time the last six months—on the radical Muslims celebrating, not just in New Jersey, but in New York, Palestine, all over! What do you have to say? They’re still attacking you!” (Jones didn’t reply when asked if he was switching his allegiance from Paul to Trump.)
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From the unfortunate angle of Trump’s webcam, his neck disappeared into the collar of his shirt and his head looked sunburned and misshapen, like a wad of Silly Putty that had recently been set on fire.“Well, I took a lot of heat and I was very strong on it and I held my line and then all of a sudden hundreds of people were calling up my office,” Trump said.
At a recent event in Florida, Trump explained to Jones, “the people were saying—many of the people from New Jersey—four or five people said, ‘Mr. Trump, I saw it myself! I was there!’”
A few hours later, Jones had moved off the topics on which he and Trump see eye to eye—Muslims cheering on 9/11, the Iraq War—and on to promoting the idea that the mass shooting at a San Bernardino, California, center for the disabled on Wednesday afternoon was “highly suspicious” and seemingly “geared to elicit widespread public outrage,” much like the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had been.
Trump’s campaign did not respond when asked if he agreed with the assessment of his newfound kindred spirit, but the candidate should get used to answering questions about mass shootings being false flag operations.
Jones, like many conspiracy theorists whom Trump now counts among his supporters and friends, is no stranger to squinting skeptically at gun violence. There is a rich subculture of mass-shooting truthers who believe that attacks like Sandy Hook, or the more recent murder of a TV reporter and producer in Roanoke, Virginia, are hoaxes executed by government actors in order to elicit fear and ultimately result in the confiscation of guns and the rise of a dictatorial government or new world order.
Sandy Hook, Infowars reported in September 2014, was a complete myth because the “FBI says no one killed at Sandy Hook.” By July 2015, the site was claiming that Sandy Hook “doesn’t add up,” according to a “retired Navy Seal” it spoke with.
After white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Infowars asked, “False Flag?” because Roof’s Facebook page had only been created recently and showed that he had many African-American friends.
Still, the only surprising thing about the 30-minute conversation between Trump and Jones is that it took so long to happen. |
