You are probably familiar with Alex Jones. He is generally viewed as a conspiracy theorist who has over the years promoted some truly weird claims that have no evidence at all.
Truth, honesty, integrity, or for that matter, evidence, are all very much out of scope. Specific examples of his claims includes …
- The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a false flag operation run by the US government
- The Oklahoma City bombing was orchestrated by the US government
- 9/11 was … well yes, you can guess.
- The Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in Syria was a hoax
- etc…
His trademark is that of the angry guy who shouts and yells.
Why is he like this?
It is tempting to consider the idea that he is a passionate nutter who gets air time, but that is not what he is really all about. A rather revealing insight came via his custody case.
The argument presented by his wife was as follows …
“He’s not a stable person,” she said of the man with whom her 14-year-old son and 9- and 12-year-old daughters have lived since her 2015 divorce. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.
His lawyer explained things as follows …
using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”
“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”
In other words, it is all an act.
What is true is that many of his listeners believe it all, and so if he is simply playing a role then you do have to wonder what is really going on here and why he would play that role.
John Oliver reveals all
The comedian John Oliver ran a 20 minute segment last July that quite literally pulls back the curtain to show you what the true driver for all of this actually is.
In fact, here is that 20 minute segment.
While it is quite easy to extract snippets from Alex Jones that portrays him as a delusional conspiracy nut, what John Oliver’s segment reveals is that in context what Mr Jones is really all about is the vigorous promotion of the products he sells.
As an example, at about the 18 minute mark in the above clip, he highlights how Jones will tout weird ideas such as Gay Frogs being caused by chemicals being deliberately placed in water by the government to turn everybody gay and so reduce the population … then will start selling you many different brands of quite expensive water filtration systems.
In other words Jones is not as such a conspiracy theorist. Instead he is a Grifter who will simply use weird conspiracy theories to generate fear within the minds of his gullible listeners and then proceeds to hard-sell his products as a solution.
Alex Jones and Donald Trump are a tag team
It should of course be no surprise to discover that there is a bond between Jones and Trump.
Journalist Bill Moyers has written about Trump and Jones explicitly operating as a tag team …
Alex Jones Is a Practiced Swindler — Just Like His Biggest Fan
Jones felt burned by his treatment on Megyn Kelly’s show, but the Infowars “performance artist” should have known their interview had nothing to do with journalism.
… Like his most prominent fan, who currently resides in the Oval Office, Jones is a practiced grifter who specializes in preying on the ignorance and insecurity of his customer base. Sweaty outbursts and erratic gesticulations aside, Jones brings to his swindle a coldly calculating eye and a genuine talent for shameless manipulation.
… Both he [Trump] and Jones enjoy a genius-like talent for finding words that reach into the hearts and minds of America’s surprisingly large lunatic fringe, not only playing them for big bucks, but also weaponizing them against common sense, social peace and democracy itself.
Sometimes they operate as a tag team. In late 2015, Trump appeared on Jones’s show and called the host’s reputation “amazing,” while Infowars’ Hillary for Prison T-shirts proved a popular fashion statement at Trump’s rallies. On election night, Trump fixer (and fellow Roy Cohn protégé) Roger Stone clinked champagne glasses with Jones as Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “My Way” played on the air.
If you think of Jones as just a conspiracy theorist then he has also successfully conned you.
Don’t be upset if that is the case, because most successful grifters like him have decades of experience in the development of skills that enable them to manipulate.
Further Reading
Here are a few quotes by InfoWars insiders within that article …
“He really modeled everything off of the televangelist networks and their knack of using trust and faith to market things,” a former senior employee of Infowars said.
“He just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, if Obama loses, we’re out of business,’” the employee said. “One of the guys in there asked, ‘You didn’t vote for Obama, did you?’ And Alex said nothing. Just a grimace. I don’t know what it meant.” A member of Jones’ staff during the 2012 election speculated that he would do anything for the sake of his show. “I personally think he voted for Obama to keep ratings going,” another former employee said. A third employee recalled Jones dropping hints that he was planning to cast his vote for Obama.
“When the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened, Alex bought tons and tons of potassium iodide and oh my god, did we sell that,” a former employee recalled. “He can sell 500 supplements in an hour,” another countered. “It’s like QVC for conspiracy.”
Two former employee alleged that Jones would instruct staff to find products that were failing and convince them to whittle their margins to almost nothing in exchange for the Infowars endorsement. “Alex’s business model was to ensnare these companies at a low rate, and lock in exclusivity,” the former staffer said, noting that attaching the Infowars brand to a product often destroyed a seller’s future prospects to go mainstream. “I’ve seen him undercut a company that sells survival straws for $25, force them down to $10, and sell them at $50,” another former employee claimed.
“He’s like the Goebbels of 2016,” another longtime Jones associate said. “He really won the election for Trump.”
As one staffer tells it, behind the scenes, Jones was far from elated on election night. “He looked depressed,” the staffer said. “You could tell when he found out that Trump was going to win. You could see his mood change.” After all, the staffer said, “his business is based on a fear of the left taking over a conservative way of life. He has to have that power of fear — that idea that ‘they’re gonna take your guns.’ Trump winning put it all in jeopardy.”