Welcome to the New World Order, where 9/11 was an inside job and secretive elitist organizations called the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Council on Foreign Relations are plotting our enslavement. Our only hope is a ragtag band of conspiracy theorists, anarchists and anti-globalists, led by the mad prophet of the Info Wars, Alex Jones.
Jones launched his empire more than a dozen years ago on Austin's public access television, a haven for kooks like the guy who calmly lectured about out-of-control feminism while wearing a toilet seat around his neck. At first Jones seemed right at home, but it soon became clear that cable access couldn't hold him; his charisma was too fierce, too weird, and worse yet, every once in a while he made sense. But between brain and mouth there was no interlocutor, so although he was capable of the occasional trenchant observation about the trampling of Constitutional rights or the erosion of personal freedoms, it wasn't worth trying to sift through his elaborate stream-of-consciousness black helicopter fantasias to find them.
That is, unless you buy into the whole global conspiracy, like the subjects of this compelling new documentary from Luke Myer and Andrew Neel (Darkon). Although Jones is the central figure here, we also meet a number of his counterparts and protégés, including 9/11 "Truthers" Luke Rudowski and Seth Jackson, retired police officer and militia-based separatist Jack McLamb, and Turkish-Irish filmmaker Timucin Leflef. They have little in common besides their fiercely held belief in the New World Order.
Myer and Neel aren't concerned about the reality of these beliefs, and they don't present any counter-arguments or talking head rebuttals. They don't have to. In a way, New World Order is an extension of their previous film Darkon, which was about live-action role-playing gamers. That movie's tagline was "Everybody wants to be a hero," which could just as easily apply to this one. You don't need a Ph.D. to figure out the psychology at work here; we'd all like to think our lives our important, and if you can convince yourself that you're one of the few in the know about what's really going on in the world, one of the few fighting the good fight against forces bent on destroying you...well, then you have a lot in common with Jones, Rudowski, Jackson and the rest.
Paranoid delusions are contagious in New World Order, and Alex Jones is patient zero. Bloated almost beyond recognition from his early cable access days, his face a puffy fright-mask of popeyed outrage, Jones leads his minions to the hotel where the annual Bilderberg Conference is taking place. He sees his enemies behind every tree and around every corner - he's continually evading cars he imagines are pursuing him and at one point announces that a nearby bare-shirted bicyclist is clearly Secret Service. When a fire alarm goes off in the hotel just as he's set to call into a talk radio show, it's simply more confirmation that They're Out to Get Him. That he's living the movie in his mind is evident from the references to The Matrix, Star Wars and even Ghostbusters that pepper his rants.
It's no wonder that youngsters like Rudowski and Jackson fall so easily under his spell; they admit that before 9/11, they gave little to no thought about the larger global picture, so why wouldn't they be susceptible to a Hollywood-ready narrative that explains it all? At least Leflef actually channels his paranoia into creative work by making his own dystopian sci-fi films. The others are activists of the worst kind, the perfect storm of self-righteous certitude and blowhard ignorance. A healthy skepticism of government, institutions and the wealthy elite is a good thing, but without ever overtly passing judgment, Myer and Neel show how easily it can curdle into narcissistic rage.
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