Alex Jones, A Scanner Darkly, and Prison Planet

I'm pretty skeptical about the 9/11 truth movement, you know?

I tried reading Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon the other week - a friend had described it as the only 9/11 conspiracy book I needed to read. Alas, I had a hard time even getting past the introduction - where he actually prints a LETTER OF REFERENCE from a fellow conspiracy theorist testifying to the fact that he is not, in fact, a crank. To my recollection, it's the first and only letter of reference I have encountered in a work of non-fiction. It served a purpose opposite the one it was intended to serve, y'know? It is very difficult to confidently negotiate your way through a book quite that fat when the author has completely shaken your confidence in him at the outset; any relationship, including author and reader, proceeds on trust, and mine was blown...

But jeez, there are a lot of these people out there, ain't there? Another one came out of the woodwork at me today - I caught a little in joke in the film A Scanner Darkly that led me back to Prison Planet, a site I referred to somewhat skeptically a couple of posts ago. Y'know the scene in the film where a streetcorner activist (seen above) is ranting about how the police are behind the spread of Substance D - and is, for his efforts, zapped with a taser and loaded into an unmarked van and driven away? Well, it turns out that that quite memorable scene is a cameo by Alex Jones, another 9/11 truth seeker (that's a link to a Wikipedia article, btw). Jones pops up again in the film - in the scene where Barris and Freck go to a convenience store on a mission to extract a line of cocaine from a commonly available household product. If you pay close attention - you have to slow the DVD down - the cop watching them is peering over a magazine that has the banner headline, "Alex Jones for President" at the top. It looks like - if that Wiki article is to be trusted - Jones is roughly affiliated with those elements in the US terrified of a globalized, UN-run world - the New World Order; and that he sees 9/11 as part of a massive conspiracy from without to subvert the civil liberties of Americans (which conveniently displaces the evils of the current American regime). I don't really know that much about him, though - I think I'll spend a little while on the site, for the heck of it; another one of his is Infowars. Apparently there's a 9/11 truth movement dude soon to give a talk at St. Andrews Wesley - for all I know, it's Jones himself.

If anyone is curious, I thought this was a must-read article on the dangers of conspiracy theory.