Talking Alex Jones and Facebook with the Sectarian Review
/Last week I got to sit down with my friend Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review Podcast to talk about a news item that caught the attention of both of us: the apparently coordinated "deplatforming" of InfoWars host and conspiracy nut extraordinaire Alex Jones by Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes.
Despite our mutual loathing of Jones and the mindset—and harassment—he promotes, neither of us has found an adequate or satisfactory response to this news, and in our conversation we try to work out our thoughts the best we can. We cover a little of Jones's history, his embrace and promotion of a particularly wild-eyed brand of conspiracism, and talk about the events leading to his ejection from those social media platforms as well as some responses to the news. While I come at the topic from my own more Burkean conservative position and Danny approaches it with a more Marxist materialist perspective, we arrive at roughly the same conflicted non-conclusions.
It was a fun if ultimately troubling conversation and, we think, an important one.
Look up and subscribe to Sectarian Review, and leave Danny a good review on iTunes! I'm grateful, as always, to be a guest there. I've embedded our talk in this post via Stitcher but you can also look it up and listen to it on iTunes—unlike Jones.