The Mainstreaming of Madness: Drudge and Alex Jones
Last edited Tue Apr 15, 2014, 06:20 PM - Edit history (1)
Last night a guest on MSNBC was talking (perplexedly) about how the Harry Reid-China-Solar conspiracy theory, about why the federal Bureau of Land Management wanted those cows, was everywhere on the right, being given some level of credence even by people one would expect to know better.
The effect he described was not a case of spontaneous generation of mass delusion.
The conspiracy theory that the BLM cattle round-up was part of a solar power plot involving Harry Reid and the Chinese government was an Alex Jones original, and its dissemination and influence was top-down, not grass-roots up.
(And, in fact, the entire anti-BLM assembly of militia-nuts was top-down. It was created and promoted by a handful of RW media outlets, including The Drudge Report.)
Matt Drudge currently links to and otherwise promotes/splashes selected anti-Democrat Alex Jones stories. He didn't used to. But lately he does. Inforwars links are now an almost daily thing.
For those who don't know, Alex Jones/Infowars is news for the insane. Seriously—news for people who think the CIA put a microchip in their head. It is a world-view where all conspiracy theories are right. (The general lean is right-wing but sometimes left-wing CT is favored also.)
Many, many, many people, including a lot of mainstream TV news people, have relied on Matt Drudge to tell them what is important and reliable for the last twenty years.
They assume that Matt Drudge does not link to "moon landings were a hoax" type stories.
They assume wrong, of course.
Thy also don't get that Drudge is an operative. Drudge doesn't have a point-of-view, he has an agenda. (Half the fun is figuring out which part of the Republican menagerie he is in the bag for at various times.)
Someone should keep track of the parroting of Infowars fantasies by folks who present themselves as serious thinkers or journalists. It is telling. And what it tends to tell is not that they are infowars nuts, but rather that they are de facto stooges for the RW so comfortable in their blinkered right-leaning view that they don't get that The Drudge Report is not any kind of mainstream respectable-right operation.
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And I guess now a kick. 
