Several times in the last year, I’ve been in the middle of a pleasant conversation with a stranger in Brooklyn—at a bar, during jury duty—when, apropos of nothing, his expression will change and he’ll earnestly say to me, “Do you know what really happened on 9/11?”

Ugh.

And every time, because I cannot help myself, even though I know that he is manifestly in the grip of a delusion, that no amount of reasoning is going to dissuade a Truther, I will argue with him. The tactic that I like best is to subject their claims to a fraction of the skepticism that they employ so frequently. Assume you are correct, I say, and that a number of buildings in the World Trade Center complex were presumably wired with explosives timed to go off at the same time or after a plane had crashed into them. (No matter that secrets known only to a few normally come out, and this conspiracy would require the knowledge and active effort of hundreds, none of whom have yet decided to repent and confess.) Even if all this is true, I ask, why go to all the bother of crashing planes? Why not just say Al Qaeda wired the buildings with explosives and be done with it? Wouldn’t that be an easier strategy to accomplish the same nefarious goal? I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory answer, though I don’t know why I expect one when nothing else about these people’s reasoning is satisfactory.

The Brooklyn Truthers I’ve met (for some reason I never run into them in Manhattan, except near Ground Zero, which is generally best avoided for all sorts of reasons) would never claim that the President is a secret Muslim Kenyan or that global warming is a hoax. I’m sure some Americans do believe all three: we have a paranoid tradition in American political belief, after all. It’s possible that radio host and arch-Truther Alex Jones now subscribes to the worst delusions of both the far right and the far left, but I think it’s important to note how he’s different from the Glenn Becks and Michele Bachmanns of the world. I say this not to in any way defend Jones, but merely because I believe in an accurate taxonomy of American paranoia. By those standards, I believe that today’s New York magazine profile of Jones by Joe Hagan fails.

Jones was already profiled just a few weeks ago in Rolling Stone. The picture at the top of each article may be quite similar, but the character conveyed through the words is not. Rolling Stone’s Jones is a longtime Austin loonie, paranoid about corporate power, a friend of director Richard Linklater, and the primary force behind the 9/11 Truth movement. Reading the piece again today, I was surprised to see that the Jonesite comments on the post generally regard it as fair. It seemed pretty damning to me.

Today’s Hagan article, by contrast, describes Hagan as essentially a Ron Paul supporter whose “views have grown to include conspiracy theories from the left as well—he’s a crossover artist.” Hagan suggests that Jones could be on Fox News or Fox Business quite soon.

But Jones is a left-libertarian kook, not Rupert Murdoch’s type at all. Hagan portrays Jones as resentful of Beck, but fails to place his resentment in a political context. By contrast, here’s what Rolling Stone has Jones say about Glenn Beck:

“It’s frustrating that I’ve never sold out, yet I’m being gobbled up by this giant Pac-Man who puts my work through his corporate-media assembly line. He takes information from me about secret combines and elites and then spins it against big government, but he ignores big business. He says George Soros is at the top of the New World Order power pyramid? Give me a break. I have no love for Soros. But I don’t trust Beck. Ninety-eight percent of my audience hates him. New listeners tell me I’m a Beck wanna-be. I’m like, ‘No, it’s the other way around.’”

Hagan quotes Jones saying “The globalists have stolen the world’s power,” and then uses the word four more times outside of quotations to describe Jones’ enemies. Twice globalist is presented straight, twice it is scare-quoted. Hagan repeatedly makes the point that Jones’ message comes in the same trappings as the Tea Party’s. But when Jones is referring to the globalists, he’s referring to global capital more than to the UN black helicopters. Here he is sounding a bit different in Rolling Stone: “Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives… The globalists are smart and tell us sin is fun, sin is a red-­devil cheerleader. No — sin is cheating other people, it’s sending troops to die in illegal wars, it’s keeping people dumb so you can control, exploit and kill them.”

Jones refers to the attacks that tie him to fellow travelers as McCarthyist. That’s not a line you’ll hear repeated by anyone in the Fox News stable. After all, Tailgunner Joe’s closest current incarnation hails from Levittown and rules cable news’ 8 PM hour. This is not to say that Jones isn’t wrong, or even dangerous. Byron Williams was an Alex Jones fan who was killed in a firefight with the California Highway Patrol on his way to shoot up frequent Glenn Beck target The Tides Foundation. Paranoid extremism comes in a number of overlapping forms of varying malignancy. I just wish Joe Hagan and his editors at New York had been a little more precise in identifying this tumor in our body politic.