America Destroyed By Design (1998)
There's a lot to unpack here by mainly is at least Alex Jones is consistent because he's pretty much the same guy in his first documentary 23 years ago as he is today, just a lot less fat and less bombastic. The doc is broken into multiple parts to cover different topics, but the main part of the doc is about the UN taking over the US via UNESCO world heritage biozones. He goes all over the country to various spots and will just go into the middle of a tourist spot and start rambling about executive orders and the UN as elderly people in jorts or windbreakers try to not look at him, look confused, laugh at him, or just walk away when he starts talking. He also multiple times will start harassing park employees about all this shit and be illegal recording without a permit and then claim they're trying to hide the truth when they eventually call the cops on him for this and his refusal to leave people alone. Also proof that they're taking over is most of these sites don't actually have the UN logo on the signs but they did at one point, so they removed the evidence that the UN now controls these lands and America has given up its sovereignty of its natural lands. Of course, as I mentioned in the previous post, this is all predicated Alex not realizing the UN and UNESCO aren't the same thing and that UNESCO has no authority over heritage sites in ANY country. The most they can do with these sites is get them removed from the list.
The doc then abruptly changes focus to the OKC Bombing being a false flag perpetrated by the government to usher in a police state. His evidence of this is conflicting initial news reports that there were multiple bombs and the existence of John Doe #2 who after a nationwide manhunt was said by the authorities to not exist, interviewing people on the street who said there were two big booms, and how quickly the government demolished the building while buildings around the Murrah building weren't damaged at all. This is a pretty short segment and it would appear he's never figured out the difference between PROACTION vs REACTION. Especially when it relates to government, especially the United States government, which pretty uniformly throughout history is a particularly heavy handed reactionary body that tries to over correct for lack of action and failures prior to major disasters, be it natural or man made.
It then again abruptly changes focus to how the youth are being indoctrinated by participating in Model UN classes. This is a really bizarre segment where he ends up interviewing 3 middle school girls trying to embarrass them by asking things like "You think the UN is cool, huh" and these are 12 year old girls just giggling and it's very clear Alex is trying to show how stupid and ignorant they are while giving off STRONG stranger danger vibes. He then does it with a row of boys as well. But then, he moves on to two high school students, a girl and a boy, and shows them pictures of UN Peacekeepers committing atrocities including: Rape, beheading, torture, other gross shit, then implies that these kids are responsible for it by participating in the model UN. The girl just kind of
and doesn't engage, but the boy he talks to asks for sources and frequently has to interject that he actually has heard of things Alex is talking about that he claims is being hidden by schools and media. Every time this kid does this, Alex then jumps to the most extremes, which leads to a conversation that ends with a teenager having to say this to Alex Jones to calm the conversation down: "I certainly don't consume the selling of human flesh." Alex repeatedly mentions Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi and member of the SS, who ended up becoming Secretary General of the UN (and later, even after his Nazi past was known to the world, president of Austria
) to this kid and uses it as proof that the UN is indoctrinating him for global taxation.
The last segment is about 15 minutes of Alex intentionally causing a big scene until he's arrested at a DMV over refusing to take a thumbprint scan to get a new driver's license. This is the closest he gets to the modern, bombastic character he is now. But throughout the doc, he tends to ham it up whenever he has some kind of audience as opposed to just talking to the camera himself. When he's on his own, he's pretty calm but definitely still intense and weird and seems like a true believer, but even in 1998 you can see him break character and smile at the camera when he gets a reaction he wants from someone or when he's doing something he's obviously going to get told to leave for so he can provoke some type of authority interaction.
This is VERY rough around the edges. Still very much a local access documentary. There's frequently hard, abrupt cuts, if it isn't filmed on a full on camcorder, it's definitely the lowest quality consumer camera available. At various points he's interviewing people with a lav mic. He doesn't appear to have a script, even for voice overs, and it would seem he only did one take of anything which leads to him frequently awkwardly pausing to stumbling over his words, even in the voice overs. It's certainly not well made on any level, it's not even particularly coherent or informative. Every segment is highly repetitive, only surface deep, and everything including lack of evidence is evidence of the global conspiracy of whatever bullshit he's talking about. For much of the doc, the camera looks like it has part of a cap over it, giving it the appearance of a hidden camera or accidentally vignetted shot, but I don't think it is intentional. He leaves in and acknowledges people laughing at him. When interviewing people, there are blatant hard cuts to shape the interview to whatever narrative he's trying to get, and there are a couple he bafflingly leaves in where he's TRYING to push the conversation to get the answers he wants for the narrative he's playing up, but the people either won't go for it or are completely oblivious and he's clearly frustrated over it.
As an entertainer, he's certainly come a long way, but ultimately he's very much the same guy in his first doc as he is today. Still ranting about the global elite (not yet the Globalists and a lot less anti-Semitism involved at that point in 1998, though), the ChiComs, the UN, American sovereignty, 1776 false flags, police state, etc. Might watch the 9/11 doc to see how much that supercharged him and if he became a professional between 1998 and 2002.
