Alex Jones has been in the news quite a bit recently, to the point where people who were unaware of him before, may have a better sense of who he is. And who is he? A terrible person. Before I tell you why we should cancel him, I think it’s important to touch on the fact that rarely are people cancelled in the way the media that leans a certain direction would have you believe.
Mel Gibson is still making movies, Roman Polanski won an Oscar, decades into his exile, and Woody Allen is… still alive. Me Too swept through Hollywood, and the majority of those men are still working. Some of them didn’t even take a break.
The point is — no matter how awful you are if you have enough money, power, or fame, there’s a good chance you can hire an excellent PR firm to erase all of it from our collective memory.
Like, who remembers reading about that one star who spent the 80s trashing hotel rooms and assaulting photographers and then landed a mega-deal with a wholesome family company and suddenly everyone forgot about their history of violence?
Anyway, one of the most effective ways to “cancel” someone is by de-platforming them. It worked with Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and Owen Benjamin. And with Alex Jones, to an extent, but it’s harder to de-platform someone who has built his own platform. Especially when that person is a right-wing conspiracist who thrives on the narrative that free speech is under threat.
He’s A Lying Liar Who Lies
When Jones was de-platformed, he started making more money. Suddenly, his nonsense rhetoric about the “globalists” was coming true, which pushed his audience to spend more. And what else has Jones used his self-built platform to do? Harass and bully the parents of dead school children.
Which is what he’s in the middle of reckoning with right now. A Texas jury just decided how much he would have to pay to the parents of Jesse Lewis. Their son was murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012.
Jesse shouted “RUN” at his classmates and undoubtedly saved lives. He was six years old. He was a hero, and he was murdered. But Alex Jones has spent years telling his audience that Sandy Hook didn’t happen. Or, if it did happen it, was a false flag. And those children didn’t exist, they were actors, they weren’t real. He went back and forth for a decade.
He called those parents liars and his audience harassed them so frequently that they lived in fear of their lives. While Neil Heslin testified in court, Alex Jones was live on air calling him “slow” and claiming his lawyers were taking advantage of him. These parents received death threats. They had people turning up outside their homes and taking photos. And then there was the endless stream of abusive phone calls and emails from Alex Jones listeners. Imagine losing your child and being unable to process your grief because someone has waged a campaign of harassment against you just to sell d*ck pills.
That’s just one case involving Sandy Hook. That’s a $45.2 million settlement for one child’s parents. He also has another trial in Connecticut involving other Sandy Hook parents. Even though there’s a dubious attempt at bankruptcy again.
And in perhaps the greatest courtroom twist outside of fiction, Mark Bankston, the lawyer for Jesse Lewis’ family, revealed Jones’ lawyers had accidentally sent a file that included his phone records to the plaintiff’s attorneys.
This includes two years of text messages that show Alex Jones lied on the stand. And two years of records that the January 6th Committee is happy to receive. There were also medical records for the families involved in the Connecticut case, medical records that Jones nor his team should have had. So, it will be fascinating to see what the lawyers in the Connecticut case make of that development.
Alex Jones in this moment is that tweet about reaping and sowing. He’s the literal embodiment of it.
He is a Hateful Bigot
When it comes to the LGBTQ+ community, Jones often says he has no problem with gay people. He can say that all he likes, but his other words show him to be a hateful bigot. Like the time he said Drag Queen Story Times are when drag queens “have their way” with the children who attend.
He also prefers to use the term LGBTP, the P being pedophile because that’s what he says is happening in the queer community. Does he have thoughts about the trans community? Does he ever! He dismisses trans people as fetishists or performers, which is why he consistently misgenders trans people or uses the terms drag queen and trans interchangeably.
He also loves to call Michelle Obama Michael and talk about the size of her… well, you know. He hit the headlines for his rant about water turning frogs gay, but he also blamed the gay community for the Pulse nightclub shooting that targeted the gay community.
It isn’t just the LGBTQ+ community who Alex Jones has a lot of hate for, he also enjoys a bit of racism and antisemitism.
Red Alert — It’s All Fake
It’s unsurprising that a man who cut his teeth on John Birch Society content would turn out the way he has. He told the world who he was decades ago. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Jones went headlong into the conspiracy that it was a false flag operation executed by the government. In 1996 he was helping fundraise for a Waco memorial for the Branch Davidian compound. You can agree that the federal response to David Koresh was botched without raising money. His talk radio show was cancelled in 1999 because his views were… difficult for sponsors to swallow. And, in an ideal world, that would have been the end of his public career.
Unfortunately, the internet gave him an outlet to rebrand his show and reach an even bigger audience. 9/11 was his opportunity to build a vast audience when he again claimed it was a staged attack.
And sometimes, if there are no catastrophes to blame on government false flags, he’ll try his hand at predicting them.
Jones isn’t adding value to the conversation. He’s creating new conversations to stoke fear in a very specific audience. An audience that, if you listen to his callers, is often not quite connected to the real world. Unfortunately, it isn’t just an audience that believes wild conspiracy theories you need to worry about, he’s closer than he should be to high-profile media pundits on the right and to politicians as well.
Let’s End It On This
You get out what you put in, and Alex Jones churns out hate. If you want the most comprehensive coverage, with the deepest insight possible into Alex Jones, his grift, and his reach, listen to the podcast Knowledge Fight.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you will start to realize just how damaging people like Alex Jones truly are. In the meantime, the Southern Poverty Law Center has also done a lot of work to catalogue his hate. If anyone deserves to be truly cancelled — it’s that guy.
Alex Jones cares about making money, and he cares about cherry picking information useful enough to defend whatever point he’s attempting to make. Unfortunately for him, he often reads headlines and no further and proves the counterpoint. Fortunately for him, his audience doesn’t care.
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