Days after appearing on Fox News to discuss a potential military strike against Syria, right-wing radio host Alex Jones elucidated an updated Syria conspiracy theory, arguing that a tentatively agreed upon effort to place that nation's chemical weapons under international control is the latest step in a broader globalist conspiracy to orchestrate the extinction of the human race and replace it with a new species of human-machine hybrids. Despite his regularly outlandish rhetoric, outlets like Fox News continue to mainstream the Texas conspiracist.

Earlier this month, President Obama began making his case to Congress for military strikes against Syria in response to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons on reportedly more than 1,400 of his own citizens, including hundreds of children, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment. On September 9, administration officials signaled a willingness to avoid using force against Syria if that country agrees to turn over control of its remaining chemical weapons reserves to the international community.

In the ensuing public debate, Fox News escalated its habit of merely echoing Alex Jones' conspiracies by actually hosting the theorist himself to discuss the chemical weapons attack in Syria. At the time of the interview, which took place prior to talks about Syria relinquishing its weapons, Jones believed that Syrian rebels -- whom Jones has subsequently referred to as “Obama's psychopathic Syrian rebels” -- were to blame for chemical weapon attacks against civilians. Jones appeared on the September 7 edition of Fox News' Geraldo At Large, where he claimed the Assad regime was not behind the attacks, saying, "[A]ll the evidence leans towards the rebels having the motive to do it. And the Russians have put out a new report saying they have proof the rebels did it back in March of this year."

Jones has since raised the bar. On the September 10 edition of his radio show, Jones expressed concerns about plans to take international control of the weapons, claiming it was part of an effort to dismantle and deindustrialize Syria (and eventually the world):

JONES: [W]hat the United Nations really wants to do here, is set the precedent that they can come into any country they want, that has any type of weapons systems -- and call them WMDs, and then dismantle that country's infrastructure.

Weapons inspections, Jones argued, are essentially a Trojan horse -- a premise globalist leaders use to infiltrate nations for the purpose of dismantling not only weapons, but its entire infrastructure. According to Jones, such 'deindustrialization' has taken place in Iraq and Libya already, and eventually it will take place in Western nations as well. Once this has been achieved, “Obama and the globalists” will maintain control of advanced tools like “jetcopters” and “life extension technologies” that will be denied to most of humankind:

JONES: Everyone is going to be deindustrialized. Everyone is going to be put back in the stone age to be controlled, and then Obama, and the globalists, and the robber barons, they're gonna fly around in their jetcopters, and their Air Force Ones, and their red carpets like gods above us, and they're gonna get the life extension technologies.

Jones sees the globalist plan extending further than merely relegating humanity to a primitive, jetcopter-less state of subservience. The globalists, represented in part by Obama, France, Saudi Arabia, the military-industrial complex and large financial institutions, are using conflict in Syria as a distraction to further a more insidious plan: “The extinction of almost everybody,” to be replaced by “a new species ... of humans merged with machines.”

Jones' thesis on Syria may sound farfetched to the uninitiated, but it's run-of-the-mill fare for Jones' radio show and websites. Jones recently speculated that the U.S. government might have used advanced weather technology to create the tornado that devastated Moore, OK, and he argued in April that the Boston marathon bombing may have been a false flag government operation. Jones also maintains that globalists are using juice boxes to “encourage homosexuality with chemicals” as part of a “chemical warfare operation ... so that people don't have children.” Jones also believes that federal government employees are abusers of a drug called dimethyltryptamine (DMT) that may or may not allow them to consult with “clockwork elves.”

None of these theories have prevented the right-wing media from continuing to mainstream Jones. Fox News hosted him September 7, and his conspiracies are frequently validated by the likes of Fox News' Andrew Napolitano and Lou Dobbs. CNN's Piers Morgan hosted Jones in January to discuss gun legislation, and MSNBC, NBC, and ABC have all hosted Jones in the past. 

The media's promotion of Jones' conspiracies can have serious consequences. Recently, his widely debunked claim that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was arming up to commit a coup against the United States made its way from Jones' websites to Fox News and finally the halls of Congress where House Republicans devoted a committee hearing to investigate his theory and proposed bills to nip the DHS coup in the bud.

Matt Drudge promised this would be the “year of Alex Jones.” Too many in the media have been happy to make that promise come true.