Was The Boston Bomber An Alex Jones Fan?

You have to hand it to Jones, he uses pretty much every chance for publicity -- good or bad -- to try and generate more publicity.

The AP (you remember them, they were recently hacked and reported that the White House was on fire) ran a story yesterday called "Bomb Suspect Influenced By Mysterious Radical." While the radical in question was a shadowy figure called "Misha," the subtext is that the radical is actually Alex Jones -- whose website the article says Tamerlan Tsarnaev read:

"Tamerlan took an interest in Infowars, a conspiracy theory website. Khozhugov said Tamerlan was interested in finding a copy of the book 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the classic anti-Semitic hoax, first published in Russia in 1903, that claims a Jewish plot to take over the world."

Noted news site "Buzzfeed" then interviewed Jones about the article -- and the response was classic Jones:

"It's just standard. Anyone you talk to is familiar with my show. When I go out in public, half the people I meet in this country and in other countries too say they listen to my show. The show is bigger than the mainstream media admits."

Wow. I guess he is just a victim of his own success.

Jones is currently pushing the theory that Tamerlan and his brother were "patsies" for the government and are really innocent. He says this recent revelation from the AP was orchestrated to discredit his site:

"I've seen this before. The federal government trying to connect me to tragedies. That's the media and the government's own conspiracy theories."

As much as I think Jones' reporting of the Boston tragedy was incredibly ill-timed, unsubstantiated, and damaging to the alternative media community as a whole, he may have a point here.

Look, yesterday he was running video of him interviewing Tamerlan's aunt who said this is all a coverup and that her nephews were innocent. It's one thing to declare as "news" and "fact" (without any solid proof) that the Boston bombing was staged by the government. It's another to then get the suspect's family involved in your theories and your "cause." That, as they say, is the "big time."

Whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers acted alone, acted with an outside agency of one stripe or another, or were complete patsies -- don't you think their family (with the possible exception of cranky Uncle Ruslan, of course) wants to believe they're innocent? If this guy -- who, as far as they know, is sort of like the mainstream news -- presents this elaborate theory that their own flesh-and-blood didn't do the crime, don't you think they'd embrace it?

But that complicates things immensely for the government. So was the story about the suspect reading Infowars true, or was it "planted?" Or: could the story have been true, but purposely launched yesterday in order to "counter" the family's claims on Jones' show?

If anybody "wins" in this entire matter, it's Alex Jones -- who, for better or for worse, is now top-of-mind for the mainstream public. But the manner in which he is insinuating himself within this particular news story -- in a sense, not just reporting it but trying to become part of it -- is sort of a dangerous game, in my opinion. Regardless if he is wrong or right (or, as I think happens a lot in these cases, some vague area in the middle).