If the Left wants to reduce the popularity of Alex Jones, it should not censor him but support those on the Left doing what is being called “conspiracy theory” in a responsible way. Examples: Vandana Shiva, Whitney Webb, Peter Dale Scott, etc.
There is dumb bullshit conspiracy theories on both sides of politics, yet the good structural analysis that the academic Left has been doing for a century or more is becoming increasingly left behind by the rapidly changing structure of Capitalism, which is impossible to track without a more fine-grained focus on the role of the intelligence communities and their contractors. Those thinkers that due extend their research into the “Deep State” (a term coined by Scott, who is as old-school leftist as it gets) get marginalized as “conspiracy theory”, while the academic Left continues to be so focused on broad structural forces, that they are losing any hope of relevancy to the rapidly changing landscape of globalization.
While most of the academic left theorizes at a level of abstraction and a pace always behind the times, people like Vandana Shiva are leading the real hope for the future. There are no simple solutions, but the Left’s lack of vision has become a resentful hatred of it, with the result that it isn’t even seeing the problems clearly until it is too late.
One could even say that the biggest failure of Leftist politics is its inability to critique and develop its own conspiracy theories. So many people were lead down the path of failed revolution due to naive trust in simplistic Marxist narratives, when they might have had more success if only they had a better model of Western intelligence communities and their intent and power. The Left has had such a narrow trust in the exclusive relevance of political economy that they have neglected not only to model the so-called Deep State, but now, more importantly, to model the major industries that are coming to play a dominant role in conjunction with the State–not just tech, but BIG AG and Pharma. Not that the academic Left is unaware of various factions of Capital and the State, or their alliances, yet they subject them all to the same narrow logic of political economy and a scientism that cannot critically engage the main logic of control in our era: State and corporate science.
