**Trigger Warning**
**mentions of racism and homophobia as well as school violence and sexual assault**
I decided to go in a slightly different direction with this prompt. Instead of one specific piece, I'm going to share an entire podcast, because I feel that it is one of the best examples of how narrative can shape almost anything, especially in negative ways.
Almost everyone who lives in Texas is familiar with the name "Alex Jones". He has been a screaming, ranting Austin-based conspiracy theorist and propagandist for well over two decades. More recently, he became known as a Sandy Hook truther, and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that has been brought by some of the Sandy Hook families. It is a well-deserved lawsuit. It is because of his hate speech that he was been removed from all social media platforms and now relies solely on the streams from his own website, which are still going strong.
Alex Jones spreads the very worst kind of information. He has a massive fan base (though not nearly as big as he claims) and he uses his power in ways that have led to horrific ends. Sandy Hook truthers, Pizzagate, even the fact that NASA had to publicly deny that they are creating a child-trafficking base on Mars. All these came from Alex Jones and people overwhelmingly believe him and give him money for the privilege of listening to him. So how does one turn the type of narrative that he creates?
Two comedians in Chicago began a podcast two years ago called Knowledge Fight, in an effort to debunk the hate speech that Jones spews, because it isn't enough to know that Jones is wrong. Sometimes the public needs to understand why a thing is wrong. Dan Friesen made the choice to course-correct the narrative that Alex Jones has created by researching everyone one of the claims that Jones makes on his shows, and giving good, sound, logical negations to the Info Wars arguments. On days when Dan and his cohost Jordan aren't up to the Jones rhetoric, they go into people who have been frequent guests on Jones' show, including alien conspiracy theorists, a preacher who would see homosexuals killed, and a former football coach who's really upset that he can't use the N-word anymore.
The narrative that Jones and his ilk have created and continue to spew is bigger than many seem to realize. We all laugh at Alex Jones and roll our eyes when we see videos of him losing his s**t, or we come across the Alex Jones-Bon Iver remix on social media and that's fine. But we need to understand that Jones is a rhetorical genius. He has crafted a deeply compelling narrative web that draws from an unbelievable amount of sources. It's easy to say that we would never fall for this, but many do, and many that do are also gun owners, and very volatile, and very angry and they fall into the fear and xenophobia that he spreads. The "fire and brimstone" preacher has great power, even if we don't like admitting that. The first step to debunking and collapsing that power is to understand the narrative that is being put into play, and to do that, we need podcasts like Knowledge Fight.
P.S. Today's episode included someone who believes that Aristotle was given "The Cave" story by aliens, so, there's that.
**mentions of racism and homophobia as well as school violence and sexual assault**
I decided to go in a slightly different direction with this prompt. Instead of one specific piece, I'm going to share an entire podcast, because I feel that it is one of the best examples of how narrative can shape almost anything, especially in negative ways.
Almost everyone who lives in Texas is familiar with the name "Alex Jones". He has been a screaming, ranting Austin-based conspiracy theorist and propagandist for well over two decades. More recently, he became known as a Sandy Hook truther, and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that has been brought by some of the Sandy Hook families. It is a well-deserved lawsuit. It is because of his hate speech that he was been removed from all social media platforms and now relies solely on the streams from his own website, which are still going strong.
Alex Jones spreads the very worst kind of information. He has a massive fan base (though not nearly as big as he claims) and he uses his power in ways that have led to horrific ends. Sandy Hook truthers, Pizzagate, even the fact that NASA had to publicly deny that they are creating a child-trafficking base on Mars. All these came from Alex Jones and people overwhelmingly believe him and give him money for the privilege of listening to him. So how does one turn the type of narrative that he creates?
Two comedians in Chicago began a podcast two years ago called Knowledge Fight, in an effort to debunk the hate speech that Jones spews, because it isn't enough to know that Jones is wrong. Sometimes the public needs to understand why a thing is wrong. Dan Friesen made the choice to course-correct the narrative that Alex Jones has created by researching everyone one of the claims that Jones makes on his shows, and giving good, sound, logical negations to the Info Wars arguments. On days when Dan and his cohost Jordan aren't up to the Jones rhetoric, they go into people who have been frequent guests on Jones' show, including alien conspiracy theorists, a preacher who would see homosexuals killed, and a former football coach who's really upset that he can't use the N-word anymore.
The narrative that Jones and his ilk have created and continue to spew is bigger than many seem to realize. We all laugh at Alex Jones and roll our eyes when we see videos of him losing his s**t, or we come across the Alex Jones-Bon Iver remix on social media and that's fine. But we need to understand that Jones is a rhetorical genius. He has crafted a deeply compelling narrative web that draws from an unbelievable amount of sources. It's easy to say that we would never fall for this, but many do, and many that do are also gun owners, and very volatile, and very angry and they fall into the fear and xenophobia that he spreads. The "fire and brimstone" preacher has great power, even if we don't like admitting that. The first step to debunking and collapsing that power is to understand the narrative that is being put into play, and to do that, we need podcasts like Knowledge Fight.
P.S. Today's episode included someone who believes that Aristotle was given "The Cave" story by aliens, so, there's that.
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