At a high school basketball game in Indiana in March, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at Latina students. Everyone knew what that meant: It was a new way to be racist.
But the alt-right’s appeal remains marginal because the huge majority of young Americans like multiculturalism. They aren’t paranoid or hateful about other races. Those ideas are ridiculous to them. The alt-right’s small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that’s changed is that one of Alex’s fans — one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke’s audience — is now the Republican nominee.
But if some disaster unfolds — if Hillary’s health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive — and Trump gets elected, he could bring Alex and the others with him. The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying.
For the record, BackChannels supports as broad a spectrum of political speech as possible bounded by criminal law associated with conspiracy and incitement.
While Facebook Civilization as Zuckerberg may shape it has no monopoly on speech conveyed via the web, it’s notable that Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan made the same grade.
In the gonzo escapade that produced dish for The Elephant In the Room, Ronson manages to get in some quality time with Alex Jones and Roger Stone in Jones’ production trailer. The “in” with the talk show host had been crashing Bohemian Grove years earlier with him.
CNN, same day —
Agent provocateur as Roger Stone refers to himself? Moral crusader for the west as befits Steve Bannon’s “populism” in the surrounds of the books collected and gardens cultivated by Italian monks? Or clowns found out and moved off the Oval Office’s carpet?
Trump stole the election and the aforementioned demons were unable to remain attached to his glory: so why read Ronson’s book?
Take it in for background — $1.99 for the Kindle — for delight in language, and for the prescient glimpse of a campaign x personality yesteryear that really does seem just like yesterday.
Having quoted from the end of the book, here’s the sound of the beginning:
The TV’s at the EQUINOX were showing a Donald Trump rally. Hillary Clinton might have been holding her own rally somewhere but, if so, it wasn’t on any of these screens. In fact, a few weeks ago MSNBC, Fox News and CNN had ignored a Hillary Clinton speech entirely, choosing instead to broadcast a live feed of the empty podium from which Donald Trump would soon speak. His empty podium: that’s how insatiable our appetite was to hear Donald Trump say staggering things in the spring of 2016, back when it was new and strange.
I plugged in my headphones and heard someone in the crowd shout out to Trump: “Are you going back on the Alex Jones show?”
“Alex Jones? Trump said. “He was a nice guy! You like him?”
“It was a GREAT interview!” the man called back.
“Oh good,” Donald Trump said. “Alex Jones. Nice guy.”
I was so jolted by this exchange I almost fell off my elliptical. Donald Trump knows Alex Jones?
I AM BASICALLY ALEX JONES’S Simon Cowell. I star-spotted him in the late-1990s . . . .
–33–
BackChannels 