The conspiracy convention: Alex Jones and the fringe right get their Cleveland spotlight

[DonViejo]

Alex Jones drew adoring crowds near the convention as the division between mainstream and radical blurs for the GOP

AMANDA MARCOTTE


The prime time programming for Republican convention hadn’t started yet Monday morning in Cleveland, but the true Donald Trump fan base came out in force at Settler’s Landing Park, a small green strip next to the Cuyahoga River. The crowd, composed mostly of angry white men festooned in either biker gear or T-shirts decrying Hillary Clinton, was there for the America First Unity Rally, hosted by a group called Citizens for Trump. It was a proud showing of what used to be called the “fringe” right, but is now the faction that, through Donald Trump, controls the Republican party.

But while the rally was ostensibly about rallying support for Trump, the true man of the hour was Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who runs “Infowars” and who was there to claim his victory in destroying the last remaining strips of sense and reality-based thinking within conservatism. While other speakers, such as Sen. John McCain’s primary challenger Kelli Ward and talk show host Wayne Dupree drew applause and some whoops of support, it was only when Jones ascended the stage that the crowd really came alive, rushing the stage to get near their hero as he unleashed a stream of paranoid rhetoric that really only makes sense to his avid fan base.

“The establishment, George Soros and others have done everything they can to try to shut down our free speech,” Jones ranted as the crowd gazed upon him rapturously. “They tried to destroy our sovereignty. They tried to attack our Second Amendment. And everything they’ve done has blown up in their face. They are failing and Donald Trump is surging in every major poll across the country!”

“The answer to 1984 is 1776!” Jones added triumphantly, as the crowd joined in, chanting along with what was clearly a favorite slogan from his long-running media empire of radio shows, videos, and “news” stories that paint a picture of a world where every violent event is a “false flag” and the world is run by a shadowy conspiracy of “globalists” that seem, by the number of times his name was mentioned, to answer solely to the liberal-ish philanthropist George Soros.

It’s tempting to write off this rally as a fringe event that has no real bearing on what’s going on in the main hall of the Republican National Convention. But the grim truth is that, as the events in the Quicken Loans Center demonstrated, so-called “mainstream” Republicans had lost out and these folks, with views shaped more by paranoid urban legends than by ideology, had won the day by getting their guy, Trump, nominated.

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http://www.salon.com/2016/07/19/the_conspiracy_convention_alex_jones_and_the_fringe_right_get_their_cleveland_spotlight/

[tonyt53]

1. They got what they wanted, an idiot.