THE JONES CHARACTER
The joy of Trump’s victory began to be overshadowed for Alex Jones starting in 2017, when he found himself becoming overwhelmed by lawsuits from all directions. The first was a public and ugly custody battle between Jones and his ex-wife (they divorced in 2015), Kelly Jones, for their three children, aged 14, 12, and 9 (at the time of the lawsuit). Kelly characterized Alex as “unhappy, unwell,” “emotionally abusive,” and “not a stable person,” pointing to his show as evidence.
“He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J. Lo to get raped,” the ex-Mrs. Jones said. After Jones made threats about House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, Kelly testified, “I’m concerned he’s engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress,” pointing out that he broadcasted from home, where his children are. Jones called Schiff a “fairy” and said he would “beat his goddamn ass.”
She also pointed out his badgering of Bernie Sanders at LAX, bringing his son along for the ambush. Jones and his family were transferring planes to head to Hawaii on vacation when they spotted Sanders. Jones and son began to pursue him through the airport. Jones called Sanders “the living embodiment of communist and socialist evil” and accused him of “running away” from him as an aide stepped in and asked Jones if he planned to apologize to the Sandy Hook families.
Jones countered Kelly’s accusations by trying to have her custody taken away. After a long, bitter (and strange) battle the parents were issued joint custody, granting Kelly the decision to determine where the children live, but giving Alex visitation rights.
The former Kelly Jones continued a public campaign against her former husband for a while, setting up sites like “Kelly Jones Custody Wars,” before she decided to move on to focus on “raising awareness about domestic violence,” according to her Twitter page.
The most insightful thing to come from the custody lawsuit was when Jones’ lawyer, Randall Wilhite, tried to dismiss the evidence from his InfoWars appearances by making the argument that Alex Jones was a “performance artist” and that the person you saw on InfoWars was him “playing a character,” kind of like a WWE wrestler.
I asked Dr. Daniel White about this revelation. Did conspiracy theorists believe what they were saying, or was it an act? Richard McCaslin was no doubt a true believer, as were others I had talked to, like 9/11 Truther Matt Naus. But what about someone like Alex Jones, who has obtained a net worth of $10 million from his conspiracy peddling?
“In some cases, I think they do genuinely believe what they are saying—and this goes back to the concept that they are simply people trying to make sense of the world and getting it wrong. But in others, I am not so sure, particularly in those with a formalized structure like the Flat Earthers or UFOs. After all, it isn’t like those at the top of the pyramid are going to admit that they made it all up,” Dr. White says.
“I remember going to a UFO ‘exposed’ talk in Sydney a few years back with a speaker who had spent two hours talking, at times pretty incoherently, about crystal councils, lizard people inside the moon and celestial brotherhoods. I realized he was on to a really sweet deal—here was someone who got to travel all around the world, talk about his (I assumed) fantasy world, and not only have people listen but also pay him very well to do so. At the time, I also thought, ‘damn, I am so in the wrong business,’” Dr. White joked. “I suspect that to a certain level it is similar to cults in that it may very well start as an ‘easy money’ scam or even as a way to get attention, but over time they start to believe what they are saying; after all, they are surrounded by people who are agreeing with them all the time. Psychologically, it is also really hard to come back from something like that.”
TO SOME CONSPIRACY THEORISTS, the “performance artist” angle about Jones was nothing new. For many years, conspiracies about Jones himself have been circulated. He’s rumored to be a government sellout, an agent of the Deep State.
This became Richard McCaslin’s belief after Alex Jones declined to offer support and denounced his Bohemian Grove raid. Richard began to find Internet rumors and allegations about his old inspiration, now part of Richard’s ever-growing conspiracy.
“I recently came across Internet reports that Alex Jones might be a COINTELPRO agent provocateur for the FBI,” Richard wrote me.
Here is more conspiracy theory muddiness: the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, did exist. It is now known that this FBI surveillance program illegally tapped an “enemies list” of “subversive organizations”—a wide range of leaders and members of groups that they somehow determined were a threat. This list included the Socialist Workers Party, members of the civil rights movement (including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X), the labor movement, and other groups working for social change. Part of the program also chased after white supremacists. These organizations were targeted to be disrupted, discredited, infiltrated, spied on, harassed, and sabotaged. The program came to light after the FBI had a lawsuit filed against them by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance in 1973.
Richard is not the only one who suspects that Alex Jones is a double agent. Matthew Naus, the Truther I met in Milwaukee, showed me several pictures of himself and other Truthers with Jones in his photo album, but then a disappointed look crossed his face—he’s parted ways with many of the people he was pictured with. The reason is that he now believes that the 9/11 cover-up is also a cover-up.
Naus believes the Truthers were either a party to the 9/11 plot or naïve stooges.
“Basically what this all is, is a second cover-up of 9/11. The first one was so obvious that they had to have…” Naus searched for the word. “…a place for all these people who figured it out, so they planned this way before 9/11. They planned this!” He flipped a page and pointed to a picture of him posing with Alex Jones in Manhattan at a 9/11 protest.
“You know about this guy… he’s dirty. He’s an agent of disinformation!”
Some of Alex Jones’ most vocal critics have been rival talk show hosts, dating back to his elder, Milton William Cooper, the author of the classic, Behold a Pale Horse. Cooper bashed Jones on his show The Hour of the Time.
“Alex Jones, you are a bold-faced, miserable, stinking little coward liar,” Cooper said on one episode of his show when he found that he had been dissed on The Alex Jones Show. Cooper’s rant was inspired because Jones had stated that he had to cut Cooper off on his show because of “the foul language he had used.” Cooper ripped Jones as a “sensationalist bullshit artist” who spreads “lies and deception.”
“Don’t ever lie about me, buddy, because I will chop you off at your ankles, I will chew you up, I will spit you out for the lying, stinking, rotten little coward that you are,” Cooper broadcasted angrily.
Jones’ rival Glenn Beck has also used his show on TheBlaze to rip Jones, calling him a “madman” and a “really spooky guy.”
“He thought I was a CIA operative who helped orchestrate the cover-up of 9/11… anything that anyone would say about me on conspiracy theory, it’s Alex Jones,” Beck said on The Glenn Beck Program. “And when they try to make me look like a conspiracy theorist, they always use his arguments and assign them to me. I’m not the FEMA camp guy. I’m not the Birther guy. I’m not the World Trade Center guy. That’s not me; it’s him.”
QANON VS. INFOWARS
INFOWARS ACTIVELY PROMOTED QANON before reversing course to dismiss it.
“You know, I’ve been told by five different Pentagon sources, high-level, that the whole 8chan thing is real, and that they’re basically forecasting what they’d like to see happen, and giving you information,” Jones initially told his audience, also saying that author and InfoWars correspondent Jerome Corsi was given the task of following the QAnon story.
But a few months later, Jones said it was time to “stick a fork” in QAnon, starting a rivalry between InfoWars and QAnon.
Jack Posobiec, an InfoWars guest, tweeted on August 4, 2018: “To be clear: Q is not real. It is either a big joke that got out of hand or a deliberate disinformation campaign by bad actors to steer people away from what’s really going on- or worse leading to a mass hysteria event.”
An entire chapter of QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening is titled: “The Fake MAGA Problem & The Day I Helped Q Make Alex Jones Cry.” In it, contributing author Dustin Nemos wrote:
“He screwed us over when it came to Sandy Hook. He let us down when it came to Pizzagate. He made us look like crazy gun nuts when it came to the Piers Morgan debate, and it’s a pattern, a trend. Q has called him out multiple times.”
Q did post a message, referring to Jones as AJ, and suggesting he was an agent of the Israeli Mossad, apparently a recruit to spread misinformation. Q’s drop read:
Why are the majority of ‘Q’ attacks by “PRO MAGA” supporters coming from AJ [MOS backed] and/or AJ known associates?
Why are we a threat to them?
THE BILL HICKS THEORY
ONE OF THE MORE OUTLANDISH Alex Jones conspiracies, and one that proves Jones can dish it out but can’t take it, suggests that Jones is deceased comedian Bill Hicks. Richard referenced the theory in his final Phantom Patriot video, where the side of his Jones jack-in-the-box read “Hicks-in-a-box” with the word “Hicks” crossed out and replaced with “Jones.”
The comedian died from pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32, just a few years before Jones began his media career… or did he? The Hicks-Jones theory suggests that Hicks faked his death, then went to work for the CIA under the Jones character as a COINTELPRO-style agent of disinformation. Besides the fact that both Hicks and Jones were intense on the microphone, lots of random facts patched together built on the theory—a production company that Hicks was involved with, Sacred Cow Productions, also has ties to Jones, and an absurd amount of effort has been put forth analyzing how similar the two men’s teeth are.
The conclusion by conspiracists, according to a report by Vice, is that all it took was a little “plastic surgery, testosterone, growth hormone, larynx surgery, and cosmetics” for Hicks to start a new life as a COINTELPRO-funded pseudo-conspiracy theorist. The theory has proliferated enough that Jones is sometimes confronted and called Bill Hicks while out in public, to his great annoyance.
“Bill Hicks is in the ground, folks,” Jones said on his show. “This isn’t funny; this is sick.”
A group of people who were also not finding conspiracy to be funny were the Sandy Hook parents. After years of harassment from Jones and his followers, they were ready to fight back.
SANDY HOOK LAWSUITS
IN 2018, THE FLOODGATE OF lawsuits against Jones opened. Sandy Hook families sued Jones and InfoWars for defamation for his claims that they were crisis actors. Three Sandy Hook families filed in April 2018, followed by six more families in August 2018.
“He knew his claims were false, but he made them anyway to further a simple but pathetic goal: to make money by tearing away at the families’ pain. This lawsuit seeks to hold Alex Jones and his financial network accountable for those disgraceful actions,” Josh Koskoff, one of the lawyers for the families, told the media.
After the lawsuits were filed, Jones was accused in court of destroying evidence, including pages and videos related to InfoWars’ coverage of Sandy Hook.
“Mr. Jones chose to destroy the evidence of his actual malice and defamatory conduct,” the Sandy Hook families’ lawyers stated in a court filing.
YOGURT COMPANY CHOBANI SUED JONES in 2017 for claims on InfoWars that the company’s owner, Hamdi Ulukaya, was linked to a sexual assault case involving refugee children in Twin Falls, Idaho, where the company is based.
Jones issued a public retraction, stating, “I regret that we mischaracterized Chobani.”
More lawsuits followed. In 2018 there were claims of discrimination and sexual harassment according to complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from two former InfoWars employees. Another legal action was from Marcel Fontaine, who InfoWars had claimed was the shooter in the Marjory Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. InfoWars broadcast a photo of Fontaine, wearing “communist garb,” a.k.a. a Karl Marx T-shirt, but Fontaine was not the shooter and had never stepped foot in Florida. Brennan Gilmore, a witness who caught the car attack on protestors in Charlottesville, which led to the death of one person and injuries to several more on video, also filed against InfoWars. Jones had called Gilmore a “shill” for the “deep state,” which led to a harassment campaign against Brennan and his family, according to Gilmore’s defamation suit.
Matt Furie, creator of a cartoon character named Pepe the Frog, which had been co-opted as an alt-right symbol, won a suit against InfoWars for using the image on a poster sold on their website. A settlement required InfoWars to pay Furie $14,000 as well as donate $1,000 to an amphibian conservation charity called Save the Frogs.
The Sandy Hook lawsuits continued. In September 2019, Jones lost an appeal to one of the defamation lawsuits by Sandy Hook father Neil Heslin and was ordered to “pay all costs” related to the legal effort.
Heslin’s attorney stated, “After InfoWars wasted everyone’s time on a frivolous appeal, we can now return to the trial court where we intend to hold Mr. Jones fully accountable for his disgusting defamation of Mr. Heslin.”
With eight more families and other lawsuits amassing, Jones can expect to spend a lot of time over the next years in court, and the forecast for him doesn’t look good.
JONES WASN’T THE ONLY ONE being sued for spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies. Lenny Pozner and his HONR organization brought a suit against authors of the book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, winning a defamation suit against them in June 2019. Author James Fetzer “acted with actual malice,” according to court documents. Wolfgang Halbig, the Sandy Hooker who fed InfoWars with his obsession, was named in the lawsuits against Jones.
In another matter, InfoWars contributor and Trump advisor Roger Stone also found himself in court. In January 2019, Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida was raided in the early morning hours by FBI agents, armed and wearing night-vision goggles and paramilitary gear, who arrested Stone. The Mueller investigation charged him with obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, all for his involvement of trying to obtain information from WikiLeaks for the Trump campaign9.
When Stone stepped out onto the courthouse stairs to give a press conference, members of the crowd turned a chant he helped popularize against him: “Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!”
DAY OF THE LONG KNIVES
THE SANDY HOOK LAWSUITS also led to a mass purge of InfoWars off of social media platforms—Twitter, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, LinkedIn, Periscope, and more sites all removed The Alex Jones Show and other InfoWars pages. Jones got hit in the wallet when PayPal removed him. InfoWars announced that they had a new platform on Roku, but they were kicked off the next day after Roku received backlash.
“It’s over a hundred platforms now,” Jones said in an interview, lamenting his treatment by social media companies. “They literally are engaging in trying to put me in a digital gulag, and again it’s because I’m exposing them.” Jones would say in several interviews that banning him would be a slippery slope to shut down other commentators, Trump supporters, and free political thought in general.
In May 2019, Facebook (and Instagram, owned by Facebook) banned several conspiracy theorists and extremists from their platform. It was dramatically called the “Day of the Long Knives,” by those given the boot (a reference to the Night of the Long Knives, where Hitler purged the Nazi Party of political enemies).
InfoWars was hit hardest, with the entire brand removed, including any pages or groups set up to share the platform’s content. Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson’s pages were also erased. Other figures swept out included controversial commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalist and political candidate Paul Nehlen, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and political stuntwoman Laura Loomer.
Loomer is a conspiracist and InfoWars guest that spreads theories that shootings and attempted bombings are Democrat false flags. She was banned from Lyft and Uber when she sent a tweetstorm in 2017 complaining that she couldn’t find a non-Muslim driver. Loomer fixated on theories about Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, including disrupting one of Omar’s campaign events. When Loomer tweeted anti-Muslim comments about Omar, she was removed from the platform, which led her to handcuff herself to Twitter headquarters in protest.
Other Loomer stunts (in which she says her victims have been “Loomered”) included crashing a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, where the title character looked similar to Trump. “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!” she shouted after the Trump-like Caesar was assassinated in the play. Loomer also convinced some Hispanic men she met at a Home Depot to climb over Nancy Pelosi’s fence and set up a tent on her lawn as a protest against immigration, as well as ambushing other events. Besides Twitter and Facebook, she’s been banned from sites like PayPal and GoFundMe, a move to shut her down, Loomer says, by the “left-wing terrorists and tech tyrants.”
Trump stepped in to tweet his support for those that had lost their social media.
“So surprised to see Conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter and Paul Watson banned from Facebook!” Trump wrote, mentioning the curmudgeonly conservative actor and InfoWars editor, respectively, and going on to say in other tweets that his administration would be “looking into” the ban. “Social Media & Fake News Media, together with their partner, the Democrat Party, have no idea the problems they are causing for themselves. VERY UNFAIR!” Trump tweeted.
As a reaction to this de-platforming, Trump hosted a “social media summit” on July 11, 2019. Tech giants like Twitter and Facebook weren’t invited, with the guest list instead bringing around two hundred conspiracy theorists, alt-right trolls, meme generators, and far-right writers to the White House. Those present at the summit included many that had promoted Pizzagate, QAnon, the Clinton Body Count, and other conspiracies. InfoWars was not asked to participate directly, but the winner of an InfoWars meme contest and other guests of the platform were there. Alt-right cartoonist Ben Garrison had his invitation rescinded after misogynistic and anti-Semitic cartoons surfaced. The “summit” turned out to not have a point except to allow Trump to air a meandering list of media bias and wrongs perpetrated against him to a “parallel universe of Internet figures and journalists” (as a New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers described) for an hour. He gave praise to the room full of supporters, telling them:
“And some of you are extraordinary. I can’t say everyone, but…” Trump said as the room erupted into laughter. “No, but some of you are extraordinary. The crap you think of is unbelievable. True. Unbelievable.”
THE JONES DEPOSITION
KASTAR, LYNCH, FARRAR & BALL LLP, lawyers for the Sandy Hook families, had a videotaped deposition of Alex Jones, over three hours long, which they posted on YouTube on March 29, 2019. A great deal of it is Jones evading answers by claiming he can’t remember what he said due to the large amount of programming he produced every week and an inability to comment on the short clips he’s shown of himself ranting about the Sandy Hook conspiracy. First, Jones tried to blame the media and lawyers for keeping his Sandy Hook conspiracies in the spotlight.
“I am not the only person to question Sandy Hook. And I legitimately asked those questions because I had concerns. I resent the fact that the media and the corporate lawyers and the establishment, the Democratic Party, try to make this my identity, brought it out, constantly brought it out, tricked me into debating it with them so they could say I was injuring people and I see the parties that continue to bring this up and drag these families through the mud are the real villains,” Jones explained to the camera. “I do not consider myself to be that villain, and I could have done better in hindsight. I’ve apologized for that, but I’ve seen the very same corporate media and lawyers continue to say that I’m saying all these things and exaggerating and using it against the First Amendment and I think that’s very dangerous and despicable.”
For most of the deposition, Jones seems aloof and sometimes confused. But toward the end of the questioning, the “Jones character” is back. He blames his compounding lawsuits on his long-running super villain, Hillary.
“I know full well that when Hillary Clinton lost the election, that’s when all this started… I remember when you first did this lawsuit you were like ‘all Jones needs to do is say he’s sorry,’ some parents said that,” Jones rambled. “And I’m like ‘I am sorry this is all out of context, and your kids died, and that was all ignored,’ so I’ve seen the disingenuousness and the fact this all just cold-blooded fit because Hillary lost the election.”
“Do you think I work for Hillary Clinton or something? Or George Soros?” the prosecuting lawyer laughed.
“I know this—when Hillary lost, the light switch went on, and I never got sued, I got sued a bunch.”
And then perhaps realizing blaming Clinton or trying a “just playing a character” defense would not be gaining traction, Jones decided to try a new approach: to claim a form of “psychosis” was behind his ranting about the Sandy Hook crisis actors theory.
“Why is the mainstream media lying so much, why is the government lying so much, the fact that the public doesn’t believe what they’re told anymore… we’ve allowed the government institutions to become so corrupt that people have lost any compass of what’s real. And I myself have almost had a form of psychosis in the past where I basically thought everything was staged even though I’m now learning a lot of things aren’t staged.”
“You said false things about Sandy Hook because of psychosis?” the lawyer snapped back. “Correct?”
“I’m just saying the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much… you don’t trust anything anymore. Kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again, so they don’t know what reality is,” Jones concluded.
9 Trump in 2016: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks” and “this WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove” and “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks.” Trump in April 2019, after Julian Assange is arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks.”