What Does Esquire Think is Wrong With Alex Jones? He's Bad for Obama

The September issue of Esquire has a long, interesting, and surprisingly un-hostile profile of conspiricist radio host Alex Jones, not yet online that I could find.

But it is not, of course, completely uncritical. Here's about the most cutting thing author John H. Richardson has to say about Jones (after a few sideways, undetailed suggestions that some of the things he believes might not be strictly true):

…Jones goes back to Clinton killing Glass-Steagall and unleashing the banks. "That's why you can't trust this power structure."

Obama's been trying to pass regulations on Wall Street, I say, and the Republicans have fought it to the bitter end after the banks almost crashed the economy--and you're disempowering Obama with your rhetoric.

"I get that the establishment right-wing wants the wars, wants the torture," Jones says. "I get all that. But they've so leveraged us into a  Ponzi scheme, we can't get out of it. The banks are 'too big to fail.' That's what the bullets and all the preparation for martial law is, for when the whole thing goes under like Argentina."

So instead of attacking Obama, I tell him, you should be saying, "Let's get those regulations in."

For all you need to know on the historical and intellectual background of conspiracy thought in these here United States, note tomorrow is the official release date of our own Jesse Walker's excellent, illuminating (not to say Illuminati-ating) book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory.