RICK-ROLLIN' WITH DONALD AND ALEX:

Radio host and Donald Trump supporter Alex Jones ranted about "the Jewish mafia," which he said was run by Jewish billionaire George Soros.

On December 2nd, while the awful news from San Bernardino was erupting, bit by unconfirmed bit, I was surprised by the crisp self-assurance of a couple of bloggers whose names were new to me. They were on it--number of victims, names of shooters, police-radio intercepts. Soon, though, the bloggers veered off from the story that other news sources were slowly, frantically putting together. The information being released by the authorities did not match the information the bloggers were unearthing, and the latter quickly deduced that, like other "mass shootings" staged by the government, in Newtown, Connecticut, and elsewhere, this was a "false flag" operation. The official account was fiction. One Web site that carried the work of these "reporters" was called Infowars. I made do with other sources for news. But I kept an eye on Infowars and its proprietor, Alex Jones, who is a conspiracy theorist and radio talk-show host in Austin, Texas. Jones's guest on his show the morning of the shooting had been, as chance would have it, Donald Trump. Jones had praised Trump, claiming that ninety per cent of his listeners were Trump supporters, and Trump had returned the favor, saying, "Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down."

Jones's amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, "false flag" ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns). Jones believes that no one was actually hurt at Sandy Hook--those were actors--and that the Apollo 11 moon-landing footage was faked. Etcetera. Trump also trades heavily in imaginary events and conspiracy theories. He gained national traction on the American right by promoting the canard that President Obama was born outside the United States--a race-baiting lie that the candidate still toys with on Twitter. But birtherism is only the best-known among Trump's large collection of creepy political fairy tales. You've probably heard the one about vaccines and autism. He even pushed that during a Presidential primary debate, on national television. Do you really believe that Obama won the 2012 election fairly? Wrong. Fraud. (At the same time, it's Mitt Romney, total loser, who let everyone down.) Bill Ayers, not Obama, wrote "Dreams from My Father." There is no drought in California, and the Chinese, outwitting us per usual, invented the concept of global warming to undermine American manufacturing. And so on.

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