Here are some things that Alex Jones, the bellicose conspiracy theorist behind Infowars and Prison Planet, actually believes:
- That a secret cabal of Bilderbergers, Rockefellers and the Illuminati control the world, and plan to kill off most of humanity.
- That “devil worshiping pedophiles basically run the New World Order. They love death and they love killing babies.”
- That Jared Loughner’s attempted assassination of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six people and left Giffords with brain damage, was “a staged mind-control operation” directed by the government’s “geometric psychological-warfare experts.”
- That the government may have deliberately created the tornado that devastated the town of Moore Oklahoma in 2013.
- That the Adult Swim cartoon Mr. Pickles, featuring a demon-possessed border collie, “promotes Satanism, abortion, and the Illuminati agenda.”
- That men are oppressed by bumbling sitcom dads like Archie Bunker and Al Bundy.
Yep, Alex Jones is a Men’s Rights Activist in all but name.
In the video above, ostensibly an analysis of the “the political and social agenda pushed during the Super Bowl,” Jones argues – and I use the term loosely – that the secret cabal running the world is using the media to tear down men and destroy the patriarchal family.
One of their primary weapons? “Bumbling dad” characters on TV sitcoms, which make men in general, and fathers in particular, look silly. (Huh. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this one before.) Demonstrating that he has his finger on the pulse of contemporary culture, he cites the examples of Archie Bunker and Al Bundy.
The rest of his rant is fairly typical Alex Jones material, an ominous if mostly incoherent assortment of dubious assertions and dire predictions about the future. Only this time he works in some oh-so-familiar MRA tropes. Strikingly, though his arguments in favor of the patriarchal family are thoroughly sexist, he displays none of the overt hostility towards women you see amongst Men’s Rightsers, whether on Reddit or on A Voice for Men.
He reminisces about visiting the homes of his alleged “black friends” as a kid, distressed to discover that the mothers were in charge. He suggests that Planned Parenthood’s is up to no good, but doesn’t explain why and tells his listeners to “look it up” themselves. (I looked it up: Apparently they’re a “Eugenics Death Cult.”)
At one point he claims that children are being taught “fisting” in grade school sex-ed classes. No, really.
But my favorite bit comes about 8 minutes in, when Jones, in the midst of explaining away the pay gap between men and women, declares that men are basically hard-wired to work harder than women:
It’s men that are meant to go out and not sleep for three days chasing down mastadons, to run them over the side of a cliff, to haul back enough … meat so that everybody survives for the winter.
That’s right: Alex Jones believes WE HUNTED THE MASTADON TO FEED YOU.
I only skimmed the comments over on Infowars, but I did enjoy this one:
I have to say that I am much less enthusiastic than Wirpaul about the prospect of bearing children, as I am under the impression it hurts a LOT.
They were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon.
I think the theory was that in primitive societies you would lose so many women to disease in pregnancy or in childbirth, and then so many children would die before reaching reproductive age, that you could not afford to risk losing the reproductive capacity of women in the process of hunting a dangerous animal. In order to keep your reproductive success at or above replacement, you could risk losing a few men but not women, as the men’s reproductive contribution could be replaced. Of course nobody has any idea whether this is true — it probably was in some environments and not in others.
Lessee, lessee… Where did I put my…
http://media1.giphy.com/media/w6MNHOoLEzBVm/200.gif
No, no that’s not it. Here?
http://www.fayetteville-ga.gov/vertical/Sites/{7C2ED344-BB55-4347-B057-121AA147A84D}/uploads/inspection_.gif
No, no. Ah, so scatterbrained these days. Was it…?
http://i456.photobucket.com/albums/qq287/schoolcounselor4kids/FirewallProtection.jpg
Close, but not quite. Hang on… Ah, here we go!
http://www.animated-gifs.eu/leisure-cinema-projection/0020.gif
*sigh* Beautiful.
This is making the rounds of the Internet, but I wanted to make sure everyone saw and enjoyed this anti-feminist picture book from 1910.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/02/04/history_of_anti_suffrage_movements_children_s_book.html
The only thing that’s changed in a century is that MRAs aren’t as good at drawing anymore. (Extra irony: whoever drew this is clearly copying the style of popular lady cartoonist Grace Drayton, who created the Campbell’s Soup Kids and founded the U.S.’s oldest society of women artists.)
The conspiracy theories are always so intricate. So many figures in the shadows. So many whispers and hints. And they always talk about things like the CIA like they were entities in themselves, instead of collections of people. I think they would be deeply disappointed if someone turned on the lights and revealed that, even if they’re absolutely right, the world is secretly ruled by…a bunch of rich old men sitting around a board room.
Maybe that’s why somebody made up the Reptilians.
Huh. So… uhh… that was the first time I had ever watched or listened to Alex Jones. I expected… well, I expected a different accent for starters. I dunno what I expected, maybe something more like the midwestern media voice.
But wow, I expected at least a little coherency. A guy who’s relatively famous that people listen to should be able to hold a single train of thought for just a little bit, right? Good god, I couldn’t follow him at all. Practically the only thing that I could parse out was little one-liners like “women being the head of the household is bad” and “men hunted the mastodons.” The rest was just a stream-of-consciousness mess.
He surely had a script, I saw him look down at a set of papers. How do people listen to this guy and even figure out what he’s saying long enough to nod in agreement? Do they just wait for the one-liners of “Planned Parenthood is evil” and treat the rest as filler?
I bet you’d find a lot more takers for this, than MRAs willing to submit to marriage as one of their own wives.
Funny how the grass is alway greener right over the septic tank.
@seraph4377:
Based on what I just watched, the reason these conspiracy theories seem so intricate, with so many moving parts, is because those parts are actually just thrown together at random. They whisper and hint because they don’t have any real model in mind; they just imply the connections strongly enough so you get the sense that they must exist but never bother working out what they actually are.
Shaenon, OMG, those little suffragettes (sorry, “suffergets”) are aDORable!
I would love to hear his explanation for why the CIA funds the feminist movement. They have done a lot of evil shit over the years, but at core the CIA is an overwhelmingly male reactionary organization that acts against foreign and domestic enemies to protect traditional american power structures. I can’t think of any way at all that the CIA would benefit from funding feminism to undermine american men.
Also, everyone, watch the Alex Jones video I linked to about Mr. Pickles and his Satanic agenda!
I’m glad to hear the CIA funding came through. I was starting to worry that I was going to run out of money for bonbons and scented candles.
@Fnoicby I know, right? So is the CIA full of manginas in feminism’s pocket, or is the whole organization secretly women?
@Katz That was indeed beautiful.
@Shaenon CAKE EVERY DAY
@ David
Whilst we’re on the subject of the Suffragists any chance of an article on Edith Garrud?
As you may have sussed from my previous posts I’m a bit of a fancy of hers. 🙂
*fanboy*!
On a boring non mammoth related serious note, the UBL and Aldrich Aimes teams were headed by and mainly staffed by women.
I, for one, support the cake every day platform.
Dammit my brother listens to this asshole.
I think Alex Jones where to tell his theories to Fox Mulder and the Lone Gunmen they would just smile and start to back away slowly.
@David:
O__________________________O
This guy is paid to do this. Paid to take a cartoon that is so painfully, blindingly obviously going over the top with satanic imagery and “analyze” all the blatantly purposeful satanic imagery as if it were some subtle thing. Paid to “analyze” a cartoon by putting a camera in front of his computer and manually scrub back and forth on windows media player.
I can’t wait for the thrilling expose where he takes a jar of peanut butter and reveals all the blatant peanutty imagery, opening the lid to reveal… well, I’ll let you look it up.
The add for pills at the end was a nice touch. Made by super expensive ingredients (really really expensive) that do… something… (did I mention really expensive?) sold with random assortments of sciencey things and people in lab coats (like, super expensive, even though we’re giving it to you so cheap). That was an experience.
Maybe Paul Elam could learn a thing or two about fleecing his audience.
@ tooimpurenangel, I am actually going to have to disagree with you. I think CIA-funded feminism is actually less likely than reptilian-funded feminism, because we have evidence that the CIA is patriarchal and anti-feminist (also racist, colonialist, etc.). There is no evidence that reptilians exist, ergo there is no evidence that they are anti-feminist.
They might even be related to these lizards: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asexual-lizards/
Yeah, but that was…how long ago now?
We’ve moved on from this. People work jobs and buy their meat pre-packaged, and we’ve done it that way for ages. We don’t need to go hunting anymore.
Why is it guys who think like this like to claim past men’s glories as if we should drop to our knees and worship them for it now? Like “I’m descended from a paleolithic man who used to hunt mastodons for the wimmens.” Great. So did we feeeemales. Or did you forget? Seriously, any past human glory that these men want to jump on to prove their point now women can claim too, regardless of the gender of those doing it.
Because we’re descended from these people. My grandpa was in the navy during World War II, do I get to claim his military service? Fuck no, it makes no borking sense, doesn’t add anything to the conversation, and it’d be disrespectful to do so.
Oh, but where do I claim the mastodons on my tax returns?
Dear god, I think the tenth little sufferget actually broke her head and died at the end.
So in case you read the suffragette book and wondered what the hell a tailor’s goose is… it is an iron. Of the heavy iron kind, not the nice light heated kind.
Family lore says a great-something grandma was a laundress and had arms like steel because of it.