I just listened to Josh Marshall on CSPAN and he got a call from a person who asked him whether he knew about Alex Jones and Infowars.com and then went into a semi-coherenet conspiracy rant about the media.  Josh said he was not familiar with Alex Jones.  I was a little surprised, but I guess that's because I'm from Austin and he is sort of an all-intrusive figure here.  It made me curious to find out how well known he is outside of Austin.

Alex Jones is an Austin cable TV/radio/internet personality and I've always believed he was the driving force behind Ron Paul's popularity among young and impressionable types, Paul being the most frequent guest on Jones' radio show.  I never listen to him, so I'm not an expert on the guy, but he deals entirely in conspiracy theories.  He got his start in the Clinton era, talking about the jack-booted government thugs of the ATF, but unlike Rush and others, he stayed anti-government during the Bush era, just transfering his venom to the Bush administration.   He is a 9-11 "Truther," who believes September 11 was an inside job.  In fact, I would say he is one of the main Truther's out there, having directed and produced several of the 9-11 conspiracy movies.

His main claim to fame is that he and someone from his staff snuck into the Bohemian Grove and videotaped the mock human sacrifice ritual that occurs in the opening ceremony.  That and the Skull and Bones thing helped fuel his belief that Democrats and Republicans are both conspiring to submit the united states to the will of the UN (or something like that). His paranoid rants focus on "One World Government" conspiracies, CIA mind control, Sept 11, the second ammendment under threat, etc.  But he also frequently showed up at  Austin City Council meetings to complain about some local sign of the apocalypse.  Fellow Austinite Richard Linklater cast Jones to play himself in "Scanner Darkly" and in "Slacker," in both cases spewing his conspiracies into a megaphone (in "Scanner Darkly" a black van pulls up next to Jones ranting on the street corner; some special ops types jump out; and they drag him, struggling, into the van before peeling away).

Like I said, I never listen to him, but back when I had cable, I used to stop and watch briefly, fascinated, whenever I happened to flip to his show.  I know a statistically aberrant number of bipolar people, but I have never seen someone so consistently hypomanic, every time I saw him, always just on the edge of fullblown mania. He obviously a bright guy, who does do real research, gathers real information which is often scary just on its face, and interprets it in the most paranoid fashion possible, taking it far beyond credibility. Unlike Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and even Ron Paul, I think Alex Jones really believes his own theories.

Anyway, I guess I thought Jones was more famous than he is, or maybe Josh Marshall just has better things to do than learn about 9-11 truthers, but I just wanted to take an informal poll and see who out in TPM-land had heard of him.