Did Infowars' Alex Jones Trigger the Las Vegas Shooter?

In his rush to prove himself a soothsayer on future events, Infowars’ Alex Jones may have actually become a prime suspect in the possible radicalisation of shooter Stephen Paddock.

During his ‘Real News’ broadcast on the day after the shooting, Jones gushed with almost orgasmic delight about the events in Las Vegas, boasting that he had predicted this very event occurring almost to the day. The horrific shooting was ‘proof’ he said, of an upcoming civil war, a civil war which Jones has been enthusiastically plugging with greater and greater frequency over the course of the last twelve months since Donald Trump was elected president.

As events unfolded on the day after the shooting, Jones clutched at a number of narratives to explain events, always turning them back to the theme that civil war is coming to the United States and suggesting that Trump supporters need to prepare themselves for it. This civil war, Jones tells his listeners, is going to be fought by ‘deep state leftists’ against Trump patriots. The irony that if there is a deep state in the United States, the chance of it being populated by leftists is zero, is lost on Jones’ Infowars audience.

But just why would Jones be pushing the civil war theme so hard? What’s in it for him and what does it accomplish? Well, it has been said in the past that the Obama presidency was the best ever driver of gun sales in the United States. A July 2017 report in forbes.com cites gun industry figures showing that the gun industry grew 158% in the eight years that Obama held office. This growth was spurred on no doubt by public figures such as Jones - whose audience runs into many millions – telling that audience that the government were coming for their guns in a precursor to coming for them, destroying the planet, fomenting a race war and forcibly microchipping them, before sending them to FEMA camps for the rest of their lives, whilst also staging false flag events such as the Sandy Hook massacre which Jones has claimed never happened.

Despite none of those things happening (apart from Sandy Hook,) Jones found plenty of tenuous evidence to ‘prove’ they were and the gullible still hang on Jones’ every word and idea, convinced he’s telling the truth.

Fear sells and fear sells big.

The morning after the Las Vegas massacre, while Jones was in full flow, fulminating about the coming civil war, speculators on the stock market were doing what they are best at, capitalizing on disaster. Stocks of American Outdoor Brands Corp, formerly Smith and Wesson were up almost 6% by midday on October 2, 2017. Similarly, stocks of Sturm Ruger, the largest weapons supplier in the United States, were up just over 4% at the same time. Speculators were banking that the fear unleashed by the Las Vegas massacre would mean higher sales of guns and ammunition.

The same effect is seen in sales of survival and ‘prepper’ products when such tragedies occur and who do you think sells a large range of prepper survival products to help save his audience in the case of disaster? You’ve guessed it, it’s Alex Jones and Infowars.

The most obvious reason that Jones has been pushing the civil war narrative is that since Donald Trump was elected, gun sales have been in freefall. With a president who relied heavily on support from the gun lobby, the right-wing patriot movement that Jones helped co-opt into supporting Trump is no longer frightened that the government is coming for them. So another narrative has to be created and maintained in order to keep the gravy train rolling, guns and ammo selling and survival supplies flying off Infowars’ shelves.

An August 2017 report on forbes.com documented that sales of weapons by Sturm Ruger for the quarter up until July 2017 were down 22% on the same period last year. One has to wonder if Jones and Infowars are experiencing a similar drop in sales - probably also compounded by a large portion of his audience realising his support for Trump was a sham all along to bring in more affiliates and sales – and perhaps his proposed ‘money bomb’ fundraiser which he has said would be in support of legal fees to help him sue people who have slandered him, is nothing more than a cynical attempt to keep his operation solvent.

So now we arrive at the time to speculate on how Jones himself could possibly be implicated in the events that led up to the massacre in Las Vegas. In much the same way that the so-called arch-satanist, Aleister Crowley, contended that his pen, typewriter, and books were magickal tools, with which he could change the nature of reality in accordance with his own will, Jones uses his website, radio show and live web streaming broadcast to similarly try and effect change in the world with verifiable results. Aleister Crowley and Alex Jones are peas in a pod.

Jones is only too aware that his own actions at Infowars can have detrimental effects on the world at large. This has been documented by British author and filmmaker, Jon Ronson, who back in 1998 joined forces with Jones to sneak into the grounds of the Bohemian Grove in California where each year many rich and powerful figures, including in years gone by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, attend the ‘Cremation of Care' ceremony which culminates in an effigy being burnt in flames.

When I say sneak in, Jon Ronson actually just walked straight through the gate and up the path, whilst Alex Jones and his cameraman sneaked and cowered through the undergrowth for a while before picking up the courage to show their faces. Once inside, they eventually witnessed the effigy burning ceremony. Ronson saw it as no more than a childish frat boy ritual, the burnt effigy being an obvious mock-up. He thought the most interesting and disturbing thing about the summer camp was that is how some U.S. presidents like to spend their summer vacation. Jones, on the other hand, went on to tell his audience that it was a real human child being burnt at the end of the ceremony.

Shortly after, one of Jones audience turned up well armed to Bohemian Grove looking to have it out with the supposed Satanists that dwelled therein.

It should be noted for sake of completeness that Jones is a cheerleader for Ronald Reagan and his legacy and also Richard Nixon, who has also enjoyed revisionist treatment at Infowars at the hands of Roger Stone. Stone was involved in dubious election campaign practices for Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and also Donald Trump, with whom he is now deeply mired in the Russian meddling scandal.

Stone has been reduced to regularly popping up on Infowars, seemingly inebriated, desperately trying to hawk Jones’ Infowars Life products to earn a few bucks to try to cover his ever-mounting legal bill in the Trump/Russia investigation. Jones is yet to explain how satanic attendees of Bohemian Grove have become his heroes, but I guess if you give him a minute he’ll be able to make a story up. The theory that Jones is every bit as satanic as Aleister Crowley seems to dovetail far more closely with the evidence presented so far than anything else I can currently think of.

The gunman turning up at Bohemian Grove isn’t the only example of Jones influence causing possible real-life catastrophe. More recently Jones helped popularize the ‘Pizzagate’ affair in which citizen armchair sleuths communicating on internet message boards imagined a child sex ring to be operating out of a pizza restaurant. Their ‘proof’ was a convoluted and wholly non-existent code they deciphered from the hacked emails of John Podesta, Hilary Clinton’s campaign manager. True to form, a gunman turned up at the pizza restaurant to investigate. Jones was eventually forced to make a lengthy on-air apology over the affair.

So how could Jones have influenced Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock to take many guns into a hotel overlooking a country music festival - where people were innocently enjoying themselves - and then open fire, callously slaughtering at least 58 people and injuring 500 or so more in the second most heinous crime to affect the United States in the twenty-first century?

Perhaps Jones himself has the answer. In the rush of confusion after the tragedy, ISIS briefly claimed responsibility, a narrative which Jones enthusiastically promoted, stating that Paddock was a ‘leftist’ who had recently converted to Islam. That narrative was stymied, however, when it was revealed that Paddock shot himself, whereas standard ISIS procedure is to fight to the death until you are martyred, hence gaining you the right to your 72 virgins in heaven. Authorities have continually stated that Stephen Paddock had no known links to militant groups.

Even though Jones was wrong in his first stated assumption, he continued his stance, publishing an article that stated that ‘FBI sources’ had found ‘Antifa’ material in the hotel that the shooting and suicide took place in. The authorities have repeatedly stated since the massacre that Paddock had no known links to militant groups.

He also desperately showed a picture of Paddocks 'female companion' in Dubai, a popular destination for Western tourists, and said this was proof that Paddock had been radicalized by ISIS. This is a classic case of Jones coming up with an answer first and then trying to shoehorn a bit of evidence to fit his BS.

Unable not to blow his own trumpet and at the same time possibly shooting himself in the foot, Jones persisted with pushing his own narratives of the event, regardless of the destabilising effect it could have on the wider, real world. Another article on Infowars’ website was self-grandiosely entitled “ALEX JONES PREDICTED VEGAS ATTACK ON FRIDAY,” with a subheading that read “Jones predicted a mass terror attack to be pinned on a right-wing patsy.”

For the record here, before we deal with Jones ‘prediction,’ it should be noted that Jones makes huge amounts of predictions, multiple times on each show. He uses the tried and tested techniques of psychics and mediums who keep on calling out names to their audience until they get a hit. Jones predicts multiple possible tragic scenarios on each show, hoping something similar in reality will occur so he can ‘prove’ to his gullible band of followers just how much ‘inside baseball’ knowledge he has of current events.

So let’s hear what Jones prediction about the Las Vegas massacre was in the aforementioned article….

“They are preparing a violent overthrow, sometime in November/October, now why do you think the communists are suddenly uncloaking themselves? Because after growing under the floorboards they want to look like a legitimate government when they take over and when they call for the racial war when they call for the uprising.

This is a playbook and it’s from them, they are saying this is happening and they are being allowed to prepare and gear up for it. What will it be in a month? What will it be in just a few weeks? What will it be? It’s snuck up on us, hasn’t it? The October revolution, that’s stretched into November and December. It’s the one hundred year anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. We’re here. It’s happening now. This is real.

What are you going to do about it is the question you’ve got to ask yourself? Because they mean business.

We have to hold our fire but we have to be prepared and know they are coming over the line.

And we’ve got to be on target and ready and everybody has got to start packing.

Because when they strike it’s going to be like fire ants, where they crawl up over your legs when they get in place, one of them that’s leading and it’s all genetically engineered you know by mother nature that way, stings you and releases a pheromone and all the others sting, once they get in place they communicate by pheromones and it’s the same thing, they get all over you, they get in place and it’s going to be boom, you wake up one morning and 300 cops are dead. You wake up and talk show host and members of Congress are wiped out. Trump Towers from Chicago to New York are on fire. So the police don’t think they can respond. But there’ll be something that happens right before that, a mass shooting at a school, a bombing at a federal building maybe more pinned on a right-wing patsy who is a listener of this show.”

Let's break down that rant Jones made to his audience of millions on September 29^th, 2017.

First of all, he suggests an event occurring in October/November before stretching out into December as well for good measure. You can be pretty sure in that timescale that there will be some horrendous event, probably a mass shooting in America that involves a right wing nut job. Why is that, you may ask? Well, because in the last 1735 days there have been 1516 mass shootings in the United States causing 1719 deaths and a further 6510 people injured. (Here’s a handy little chart that tracks them all.) Probably quite a few left wing nut jobs in the gunman tally there too but there is your first example of Jones psychic cold calling a few months out to his audience for a tragedy to occur. This is a simple game once you get the hang of it.

He then tells people they need to prepare. They need to ‘be on target and start packing.’ Sounds like a reference to buying guns and shooting them to me. He started to build up the fear nicely first and remember, as we have seen, that’s a way to get the gun lovers fired up and purchasing new ammo and weapons.

After a segue into the complete insanity of his fire ant analogy, Jones gets back to the cold calling routine where you’ll wake up one morning with 300 cops dead. Or talk show hosts are dead. Or members of Congress are dead. Or Trump Towers across the United States are on fire. Or there is a mass shooting at a school (playing it safe there Alex!) Or a bombing at a federal building.

“Pinned on a right-wing patsy who watches this show (Infowars).”

You have to admit, if you give yourself a three-month window, quite a few of those things could possibly happen in the States. The most likely being a mass shooting at a school, or a mass shooter who has been wound up by Infowars and Alex Jones constant plugging of violent civil war, who ends up being “on target when they are packing.”

Or maybe a left wing nut job that has been so inflamed by Jones’ irresponsible rhetoric they possibly believed it and tried to start a civil war themselves.

Or maybe a suicidal psychopath who watched Infowars and thought it would be a hoot of a way to go out.

If I were the authorities investigating this shooting, I would start at some point sifting through the contents of the comments in Infowars’ readers’ comments section very carefully. Very carefully indeed.

I have to point out here that I’m not saying any of the above is what happened or will happen, but if it had, it wouldn’t be the first time Jones has succeeded in making someone do something real crazy.

Alex Jones: Stochastic terrorist.

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