Parkes is not pushing despair, so he is not on my radar in that respect. AJ IS. And has been. He made an utter A$$ of himself running around cursing and screaming with a bullhorn and disrupting Millie Weaver. All the good things he may have ever done in the past are erased by what he does now.
As they were designed to be. I have to say that when AJ was first outed as controlled opposition, it was a lot for me to get my head around. That the cabal could be that sophisticated and long term in their thinking as to promote a guy who spent most of his time attacking them, was a bit mind boggling. But Jones was designed for the end game when he would be needed to co-opt the patriot movement. I guess the cabal's thinking was there was more to be gained from that than would be lost by him dropping truth bombs on their schemes. After all, there have always been legitimate truth tellers out there exposing the cabal before Jones came along. So their attitude was, "Why fight it when you can co-opt it"?