Trump, Jones, and Press TV: The Paranoid Style in America and Iran

Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered on the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001.  Ted Cruz’s father was friends with Lee Harvey Oswald. Climate change is a Chinese hoax designed to hurt American industry. Donald Trump has talked and, mostly, tweeted, about these conspiracy theories since he descended from an escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. But these are not really Trump’s ideas. Rather, he owes many of these theories to one of his most prominent supporters, a Texan radio and TV host named Alex Jones.

Jones is the host of The Alex Jones Show, and the man behind infowars.com, a popular website that receives around 40 million unique viewers a month. Jones presents himself as a defender of American liberties against an evil federal government and a globalized world order, and is best known for his own conspiratorial claims – many too outlandish even for Trump – such as the fantasy that the US government was behind the September 11 attacks or that the massacre of 20 small children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut in 2012 was staged with actors. Appearing in an infowars interview in December 2015, Trump told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing.”

“I Like to Talk to the Iranians”

In addition to his efforts to build his American media empire, Alex Jones regularly seeks opportunities to appear in foreign media, and has appeared on British, Russian, and Japanese TV.

He has also appeared on Iran’s state-run English language broadcaster Press TV, where, in the aftermath of Islamist terrorist attacks in the US, he has raised the alarm about what he calls “false flag” operations designed to justify US military interventions in the Middle East or restrictions of American civil liberties.

Speaking in the wake of the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, in which US Army Major Nidal Hassan killed 13 people and injured 30 others after being influenced by Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar Al Awlaki, Jones told Press TV, “I just pray this wasn’t a politically motivated event...we’ll see if it begins to be spun as some kind of pretext to continue all these wars going on in the Middle East...if it comes out that they’re saying this was some kind of organized event or an organized operation, and that this was some type of Islamic plot, then nine times out of ten this would be a staged event.”

Speaking to Press TV after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Jones said, “If you have studied past intelligence operations and you have seen how  have done this before, this is a classic false flag, a classic self-inflicted wound staged event.” He also said that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was similarly staged. When the host asked why the US government would want to carry out “a false flag operation like this,” he said, “It becomes a political diversion and allows the security state to begin to set up checkpoints and really a type of soft martial law around the country.”

When Press TV lost its UK broadcasting license for airing the forced confession of Newsweek journalist and IranWire founder Maziar Bahari, Jones said, “The war for freedom of speech is now on.” He suggested the real reason the channel lost its license was because the British royal family objected to its reports of their opulent lifestyle.

Jones has implied on more than one occasion that he himself is the victim of conspiracy thinking surrounding his Press TV appearances. “The media is always like, ‘What, do you work for the Iranians?’ No, I like to go talk to the Iranians,” he once said on infowars.

The Paranoid Style, from Khamenei to Trump

Jones and Iran both love conspiracy theories. In Iran, conspiracy theories are an especially hot political currency. Iran’s history has been so marked by British and Russian imperial machinations, and by the real British and American-backed conspiracy to overthrow the nationalist Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, that Iranian political culture is especially receptive to ideas of conspiracy. Conspiracies, Iranians can say with justification, really do happen.

Just as historian Richard Hofstadter identified a “paranoid style” in American politics, Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian has identified a “paranoid style” in Iranian politics, which forms the topic of a chapter in his 1993 book Khomeinism.  Abrahamian notes the popularity of conspiratorial language in Iranian politics, citing such Persian language terms as nofouz-e biganeh (“alien influence”), aroosak (“marionette”) and posht-e pardeh (“behind the curtain”).

“The message of this vocabulary,” he writes, “is that the intelligent observer should ignore appearances and focus instead on the hidden links; only then can one follow the plot, understand the hidden agendas, and identify the true villains.”

For Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, conspiracy thinking is an effective defense that prevents Iran’s Islamic government from being overthrown by enemies lurking behind curtains. “We are not, like [Chilean President Salvador] Allende and Mossadegh, liberals willing to be snuffed out by the CIA,” Khamenei once remarked shortly after Iran’s 1979 revolution.

Speaking earlier this year, Khamenei pressed his case. “Some people deny the existence of the enemy,” he said. “When we speak about an enemy, such individuals say, ‘You are suffering from an illusion, a conspiracy illusion.’ In my opinion, bringing up this conspiracy illusion is a conspiracy in itself. In order to decrease sensitivities, they say, ‘What is the enemy? Which enemy?’ They deny the most obvious things.”

To fulfill Khamenei’s vision, his security forces regularly arrest cast Iranians in the role of the “enemy.” Specialized interrogators then coerce these prisoners to confess to nefarious deeds behind the curtain of international relations, thus fulfilling the supreme leader’s conspiratorial worldview.

While Donald Trump has no evident sympathy for Khamenei (earlier this year he he remarked of the supreme leader, “He’s not the supreme leader for us, I can tell you that”), his indulgence in conspiracy rightly worries many Americans. Whereas conspiracy theorists on the fringes of society see the people in power as the ultimate villains, conspiracy theorists in power must produce villains from among the citizenry.