Alex Jones, of the internet/radio network, InfoWars, has alleged that 9/11 was an “inside job” ordered by George Bush, that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre was very possibly a hoax staged by the Obama administration, and that a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was a front for a Hillary Clinton-led, Satan-worshipping, child sex ring, and that all were part of a “globalist” plot. Deluded paranoia? Absolutely. But his audience is large and growing, with one fawning fan of special note.

During the presidential campaign, while personally accepting Jones’ endorsement during an on-air interview, Donald Trump gushed, “You have an amazing reputation. I will not let you down.” Jones has remained a “news source” for him since the election. As to whether Trump genuinely believes this nonsense or is spinning another big lie, we must remember that, providentially, one synonym for nonsense is “trumpery,” which is derived from the French verb tromper, “to deceive.” Look it up in your Webster’s.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump gotta spew nonsensical lies. Like a lemming to the sea, he gravitates to self-deluding conspiratorial paranoia.

In our history, he is not the first. In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter published a classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which chronicled the phenomenon’s ebbs and flows through time. Prompted by “fundamental fears and hatreds,” manifested as “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” the style, he said, has combatted an array of supposed enemies of The Good, whether real or imagined or cynically concocted: Monarchists, Mormons, Masons, Papists, Capitalist usurers, and Communist saboteurs.

At one time or another, it has been embraced by both Leftists and Rightists and all in between. But the style has had a particular appeal to traditionally privileged groups in the midst of losing economic, social or cultural status, those who “feel dispossessed, [that] America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,” those who maybe feel the need to “make America great again,” as in “when people like ‘us’ were ascendant.” Sometimes, those bred to the dogmas of class, religious or race superiority will be ill-equipped to deal with their loss in rational terms. Consequently, they retreat into paranoia.

Hofstadter began his account with the instructive case of the Illuminati, a late 18th century organization founded in Bavaria that, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, promoted science and reason. Reasonably, religious conservatives objected. But unreasonably, some began accusing the Illuminati of secret ritual murders and vast, superhuman conspiracies to trigger wars, revolutions, and financial panics in order to achieve global domination. The hysteria reached America in 1797, and soon, some traditionalist New England ministers with Federalist leanings were breathlessly accusing Jeffersonians of just such illicit Illumination.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as so much simplistic foolishness, but the simplicity is its fatal allure. All the mystifying woes of the chaotic world were explained in one thrillingly paranoid insight — “they” were to blame for every sin, every catastrophe. Vanquishing “them” would eliminate every evil.

And so it is with Alex Jones. His criticism of globalization is reasonable, but he then takes an unreasonable leap into paranoia over “globalist” pizzeria plots. Plots that, as it turns out, are merely parts of a grander plot to create a tyrannical New World Order. And to do so, he tells us, by subverting the Christian West in alliance with Jewish bankers. And to utilize the Muslim World and China as unwitting pawns in that subversion. And, surely you see by now that, once unmasked, those fiendish plotters are revealed to be none other than — the immortal Illuminati. Yes, those same Illuminati, the original “deep state” of paranoids’ delusions, catnip for crazed conspiracy theorists of all eras, back and better than ever in 2017. So says Alex Jones, seer of Unseen Things.

But these are the besotted hallucinations that our commander-in-chief, the most powerful man on earth, now praises as “amazing.” The “paranoid style” has a long and destructive history in our politics, but it had never totally consumed the White House itself. Until now.

Our fraught relations with North Korea, China, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, etc. are now under the erratic “control” of Donnie the Illuminati-Slayer. What could possibly go wrong?
Jim Wiggins is a former history instructor at Copiah-Lincoln Community College and a Natchez resident.