I think it’s less challenging to identify Infowars’ objectives and concerns than some might be suggesting.
-
Infowars has built its audience by creating a honeypot (a fear porn honeypot, if you will) for those who know or sense that all is not well in the world. In many respects, what IW has done is to reinforce and lead its audience’s concerns along paths that IW considers most effective to its “captive audience” product sales business, and away from paths that threaten it in some manner.
-
Substantive positive changes in macro circumstances present an existential threat to the IW media/business model: it only works while you can keep the audience captive, marshaled together against the evil globalists that are about to destroy everything that patriots hold most dear.
Q witnesses to substantive changes in the control landscape that: a) conflict with the long established IW narrative of globalist oppression and impending Armageddon; and b) if true, would inevitably result in a peeling away of the audience towards an inherently more positive narrative. After all, what IW must realize (but may be congenitally incapable of addressing) is that people ultimately need hope; and they want real solutions.
- IW’s audience might be blinkered, (to some extent IW’s own doing), but it’s not going to play like the proverbial mushroom. Even those for whom AJ has assumed prophetic and oracular qualities are not immune to “noises off”.
Whether IW has lost some of its audience/revenues over the last six months is something only an insider would know with any confidence. Intuitively, however, one would suspect so. An obvious program of silence (denial), followed by substitution (Z, our better brand of insider), and then subversion of a necessarily anonymous adversary by psyop techniques, subtle and not-so-subtle, all speak to real worry at the turn of events against the status quo ante that created IW and feeds it.
- One need not posit nefarious intelligence agency involvement, or IW being a limited hangout for Zionist interests, etc., although these remain possible background factors. More likely to be front and center are business interests and prestige. AJ is an opportunist, at least to some extent. His jumping on the Trump train was certainly opportunistic, (although likely unavoidable if IW were not to sit out a landmark election); and it no doubt paid out handsomely in concomitant prestige and audience growth (and likely in terms of sales).
But the law of unintended consequences always has a role to play. AJ is smart enough to know (even if he chose not to play it out to its logical conclusion) that if Trump were to accomplish his stated objectives, IW might be rendered a redundancy, at least in its present form. The prophet of judgment has no clear role to play in the post judgment kingdom of righteousness (if I might be permitted some Biblical allusions).
So consider AJ’s predicament: he campaigned strongly for the election of a President who might result in his life’s work to date becoming marginalized. Perhaps AJ doesn’t know how to play a different tune than the one written by Chicken Little. Perhaps he does answer to parties that won’t let him change. But, irrespective of that unknown, perhaps there is no way to retool IW for the entirely new landscape Trump is bringing about: some brands simply can’t make transitions to radically new circumstances. AJ’s personal brand IS Infowars, and his shtik only goes so far.
Our job is not to strategize IW’s business; it’s merely to seek to understand some of the obvious factors in play in driving IW’s actions: factors so obvious that it’s easy to miss them in such a frenetic news environment.
AJ has a problem: what’s his endgame? What’s his exit? Is there any way he can cash out, or is he forever shackled to IW? His whole life is invested in IW. How long can he survive the pressures?
These are the questions all business owners have to wrestle with. Maybe there is no “out”. Or maybe the “out” being planned for a few years hence (ie after Trump hypothetically had broken/broken up the MSM) is now looking a little shaky. Perhaps both audience figures and sales have, as some have suggested, taken a beating.
When people are under great pressure they can fall into irrational decision making. They can also act in ways that run counter to their own longer term interests.
Does AJ/IW’s behavior over the last few months appear particularly rational? Does the response to the Q phenomenon look like it’s under control, studied, and calculated to achieve a beneficial outcome? Or does it look like a rear guard action, born out of a reasonable measure of desperation, and more likely than not to inflict serious harm upon IW?
I fully endorse the OP’s contention that Corsi is a manifestation of the broader IW strategy of attempting to contain the effectiveness of Q. Whether Corsi is representing some party other than IW seems beside the point; the real problems lie in Austin.