Your family becoming worried about your consumption of InfoWars — that’s probably the first sign. You tell them it’s a scholarly thing, you’re a student of Alex Jones (as opposed to a student of Alex Jones’s), but if that was a joke they don’t seem to get it. You’ve done this before, or more or less, the obsessing over things you find basically repugnant. (Sarah Silverman regards this as a quirk of Jewishness, the need to shove your whole face in and “smell the sour milk.”) You’re only half-Jewish. As a child you consumed anything you could about aliens, and were deathly afraid of aliens. (You’re given to understand that a young Kurt Cobain was also like this, even specifically that the cover of Communion, Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction memoir, had scared the living hell out of him, too.)
But you’d seen some questionable connection, some exploitable thread, linking InfoWars and Alex Jones to George Orwell and 1984 — that is supposed to have been the point. You were supposed to have discussed 1984 on its 75th anniversary, or maybe its 40th. Har har. (You have your doubts about this kind of assignment in general, things pegged to anniversaries, and in any case you’ve blown your deadline by a couple of months; 1984 was published in June 1949.) It’s not that there isn’t any there there, so to speak, that’s not what makes it questionable. Alex talks about Orwell any chance he gets, which is to say he says the same two or three things whenever the opportunity presents. There is a chant he loves to lead, say, when he’s approaching the Capitol on January 6 (“The answer to 1984 is 1776!”), and Alex knows the trivium that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair. (He pronounces the pen name somewhere in the neighborhood of JARGE ARR-WELL.) That this is, functionally speaking, all he knows was to have powered the original head-fake in your pitch to your editor: that 1984 is just “universal” which is to say vague enough that anyone of any political persuasion can point to it. You were going to pull quotes from the book that a right-winger would be liable to read as prophetic or probative of their position, or whatever. But you were going to then do what Alex never does, contextualize, providing insight into the specificity of Orwell’s historical/political moment — and yes, undercutting what had until then masqueraded as your argument in re: vagueness/universality. This was supposed to have been a very clever moment indeed.
You’d had the idea but then couldn’t get down to it (which isn’t like you, you’re a go-getter) and then kept doing your quote-unquote additional research into Alex and InfoWars and that was where the family entered the picture, being all needlessly worried. You would’ve gotten to it soon enough, or eventually — really — but then someone took a potshot at Donald Trump onstage at a rally and everything really came unglued. Certain fine but firm lines began to vibrate and blur. Your own and your friends’ and peer group’s and family members’ and political allies’ (real or imagined) vis-à-vis adversaries’ (same) reactions became hard to distinguish. The way your dreams digested or dissolved this complexity only added to the complexity. (When you’d been sleeping, anyway.) Someone, a friend, pointed out how Trump being saved by having turned his head up and to the right inverted JFK’s back and to the left in a way that couldn’t have been more symbolically perfect. Somewhere, maybe a message board, a joke about “Kentucky windage” got made that then morphed into a joke about wind shear, citing the movie Outbreak from 1995 featuring Dustin Hoffman. The AR-15 emerged as central to more than one conversation or group text or nightmare. Variations on Hi, NSA! or Well if you weren’t on a list already, you are now. It wasn’t hard to imagine (or did it really transpire?) that Alex took to the airwaves and quite literally forced his employees to intone a prayer in words of their own choosing, each in turn, for the live audience. You almost sympathized with whoever had to go first. An exasperated friend texted to say, of Americans and their guns, that the fetishism is so obvious as to hardly merit unearthing, which (d)evolved into a conversation about how, as recounted in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, drummer Dave Grohl’s dad, the very first time he heard Nevermind, noticed that the first three songs all mentioned a gun (having or not having one, making sure it was loaded if you did) and told Dave, basically, oh so it’s Kurt’s dick. And that was in 1991.
The Armalite/Colt AR-15™ is kinda the Kleenex or Dumpster (™, ™) of the Guns & Ammo set.
At a certain point you shut off your phone, ignoring several unreturned texts and unanswered calls. Down to business. On Netflix you select a multipart documentary about Russia/the U.S.S.R.-U.S. relationship/nuclear annihilation, thinking even before you hit Play that the relevance is almost downright spooky. Stalin pictured as a young thug was a handsome devil, so to the degree that you can or are encouraged to read Big Brother as a stand-in, all the suggestions about him being hot (while having eyes ever on you) make a lot of sense, suddenly. The thrust of the doc overall seems to be that you can trace a line directly from the nuclear arms race, beginning around the middle of WWII, through to today, the modern security state being both a relic of a Cold War that putatively ended and something that Americans have become slowly inured to, to the point of not even being able to see it. You think of that parable about the fish not knowing what water is. The CIA itself didn’t even exist until after the war, and it was a bumbling failure in its formative outings, which can be forgiven given that it was up against a KGB that had already been an NKVD and a Cheka and God only knows what else. You think of that parable involving the frog and the pot of water brought to a boil. Of the unreturned texts, the most recent had its contents partially visible on the lock screen of your phone as you powered it down. Of the InfoWars employees who’d had to intone the prayer, you are already familiar with most, if not all: Harrison Smith (out-and-out neo-Nazi), Owen Shroyer (did time for January 6), Chase Geiser (what a name). Alex sometimes refers to what Chase does for him as “beavering.” And wouldn’t that be the way it goes down, the eyes that are ever on you being ones that, well, maybe you don’t mind so much being there?
One of the unforeseen consequences of the first atomic test at the Trinity site, in 1945, in the New Mexico desert, was that the sand immediately under the tower that had held the bomb safely aloft had (the sand) fused from the immense, intense heat generated by the blast, into a kind of pocked ore that technically qualified as glass and that the assembled scientists had dubbed “Trinitite.” The fact that your editor happens to be the possessor of a half-dollar-size chunk of the stuff cannot be the kind of thing that quote-unquote just happens. Learning of these things, watching as the correspondences stack up, becomes seductive not just intellectually, you are finding, but because there is an affective chord somewhere being gently stroked; the everyday objects in your apartment sizzle — it’s as if someone tweaked your own personal brightness dial. A frisson settling at the base of the spine. Trinitite just so happened to be green, a green glass, technically. One of the atomic spies — the Soviets had more than one in on the Manhattan Project — was named David Greenglass. Trump’s wannabe assassin (his Princip or his Oswald) had taken his aim from atop a warehouse belonging to AGR: American Glass Research. And an onscreen someone with an unplaceable Eastern Bloc accent opines that Vladimir Putin doesn’t seek a restoration of the U.S.S.R. so much as a return to the perceived glory of the Russian Empire. In which case, you are thinking, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to keep the larder stocked with an extra-beefy CIA.
You are willing to cop to the lack of sleep becoming a problem (also the voice you hear your thoughts in being a little too loud, out of nowhere), but doesn’t Donald Trump offer the ultimate counterexample, or could it be that his partisans really find him pretty? Also, an inchoate but discomfiting idea begins to take hold, the unique frustration of something being always just out of reach or beyond naming, of notions that seem, even feel, great but that aren’t quite resolving in a way you can get your head around. Your editor, Arch, will provide essential guidance, and so to help him out you begin printing off what you are referring to as notes, organizing them according to their various threads, each into a folder of its own color — Orwell in blue, InfoWars in red, Nirvana in yellow, Russia in green, nukes in purple, an orange folder that becomes quickly unwieldy and overflows with printouts relating to various domestic spy agencies. Trump doesn’t get his own folder, because the story of Trump getting shot strikes you as so all-encompassing that to organize those notes would be futile. Arch grew up partly in New Mexico but partly in your old stomping grounds, near the Mason-Dixon Line, one reason you get along so famously. You gather up the folders and your keys and MetroCard and set out for his place in Riverdale.
This has been an obvious mistake, though, because clearly anything relating to nukes should be green, both on account of Trinitite and for ironic commentary, maybe, about environmental impacts. Nor can you overlook certain affective valences relating to color: Russia should probably be filed under blue due to its (blue’s) overall cold, clinical gestalt, for example. It begins to upset you on the subway. The AR-15, or what we now know to call an “AR-15 style” rifle — the Armalite/Colt AR-15™ is kinda the Kleenex or Dumpster (™, ™) of the Guns & Ammo set — essentially just refers to a gas-powered semiautomatic of a certain contour that is easily moddable, has negligible recoil, fires at high velocity, and, being largely plastic and aluminum and not so much steel, weighs next to nothing. Baby’s First Lil Murder Machine — there have been mass shooters who had never even fired a gun prior to executing their first victim, and who selected the AR (style) for expressly these reasons. The message on your lock screen had been from your sister and mentioned the name of a doctor whose home office you are none too keen on darkening the door of again. You seize on the idea of filing anything InfoWars in yellow, thinking of how Alex is such a chickenhawk. But then what to do about Nirvana? Yellow indicates some lack of ease but of course not on the level of orange (a dire warning) or red (the system blinks in abject terror). You’d been happy or at least somewhat relieved, in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting, not to have been alone in jumping to the unevidenced conclusion that that shit was staged. How Alex avoided a custodial sentence when Owen, who is a charisma vacuum and so had engaged in the same behaviors, just less effectively, on January 6, got two months in prison — how this came to pass is beyond you. Early reports had indicated that it might not have been a round from the shooter’s AR but a fragment of glass from Trump’s own teleprompter that got him; it almost doesn’t matter that you can clearly see an intact teleprompter in the photos, it feels like something that ought to be true, and so it is. Or can be. What Chase does for Alex — beavering — mostly entails printing out headlines and tweets and shaping the results into “stacks” for the InfoWars broadcast. The apparent lack of casualties among rally-goers is another element to be seized on, even if ultimately untrue (someone lay dying as the crowd chanted U-S-A, U-S-A). Green (peaceful, soothing) turns out to be all wrong even at the granular level of the Trinitite, aka “Alamogordo glass,” which after all is nuclear fallout, though its half-life is admittedly less scary than that of other radioisotopes enchained by the test blast (plutonium-239’s is on the order of 24,000 years). You worry a little that Arch has been exposed, irradiated slowly. You might insist that his personal chunk not be in the room when you hand over, Woodward- or Bernstein-like, all your notes. The triumph of feelings over facts is if not something InfoWars invented then something it perfected, has been your operating assumption. A thought, dark like a sudden storm, involving Cobain’s obsession with Lennon and Manson’s obsession with the Beatles and the CIA’s (possible, bruited) involvement with Manson and all it takes is the name of MK-Ultra headshrinker JOLYON WEST flashing across the mnemoptical screen for this road, like all roads, to converge again on JFK. On the stoop of a house in the Bronx it isn’t Arch you are greeted by but his wife, Veronica, who you have decided likes you overall but currently seems … deep orange. Trump needed to redirect attention from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 and the (latest) Epstein revelations and so, because you could impute this motive, well … After their forced prayer the InfoWarriors had moved into asserting without evidence that Trump’s would-be assassin had been Antifa. Veronica, who unlike you has a cellphone on her person, is dialing a number, and after an almost suspiciously short span of time there will be the silent but strobing approach of an emergency vehicle and a couple of put-upon EMTs will make the mistake of wondering about certain elements of the whole assassination “narrative” as they sedate you, en route, ignoring your protestations in re folder-coloration and -mixing, saying something about the deep state…
… Something about civilizations needing first to destroy themselves from within, before they can be overtaken from without. But mostly, as the chemical warmth overtakes you and the overexposed light in back of the ambulance dims, you are left with a lone image from 1984, a reference to a single swatch of text, eminently cherry-pickable in that Alex Jones way: of an American life drained of curiosity, of enjoyment, of all quote-unquote competing pleasures, without art or literature or science or even sex, “with no distinction between beauty and ugliness” (an especially fatidic line, or so it seems to you at present), and where beside remains only the
intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
And you, you too can feel the slippage, the happiness in ignorance or slavery or a warm gun … the lobotomized contentment of that end-state. You, too, have won the victory over yourself. You love — but the ocean wave shrugs. Darkness, coming down fast. Yes she is. Do it to her, to Julia. Julia, what a …
Oh, well, whatever. Never mind. ❖
Mike Laws is, in point of fact, only somewhat obsessed with Alex Jones. He is actually far crazier and much more difficult to be around when it comes to his beloved Baltimore Orioles.
