Alex Jones from Infowars.com speaks during a rally in support of Donald Trump. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
A merican far-right radio host Alex Jones believes that Hillary Clinton is literally a demon – a red monster with a rubber face, an unregistered foreign agent from hell, which is a real place, where Satan, who is real, tortures unbaptised babies with a big fork in between demanding sacrifices of “blood, semen, and breast milk” from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. I am only editorialising a little.
Jones, an ardent Trump booster, has made such claims over and over again on his too-popular-for-comfort radio programme, the Alex Jones Show, as well as on his websites, the best known of which is Infowars.com. He’s called Clinton a “demonic warmonger”, a “damn demon”, and an “abject, psychopathic demon from hell” who attends a “witches’ church” and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped [children]”. If she won the election, Jones warned his followers last year, Clinton would “try to destroy the planet”. He once accused former secretary of state John Kerry of membership in a satanic sex cult, in which devotees have “gay sex hundreds of times in coffins begging for spiritual entities to possess them. That get in coffins hundreds of times in giant pits of faeces and have sex with each other. OK? That’s who’s running things! ... That’s what we’re dealing with, ladies and gentlemen.” Jones thinks the moon landing was faked and the government is putting chemicals in the water to turn people (and frogs) gay.
The current president of the United States of America, Donald J Trump, who has access to nuclear weapons, once appeared on Jones’s radio show, calling the host “amazing” and vowing, “I will not let you down … I think we’ll be speaking a lot.” Earlier this year, Trump pushed one of Jones’s conspiracy theories, claiming that the “dishonest press” is covering up terrorist attacks by Muslims in order to coddle Isis. Name a conspiracy theory, no matter how obscure, and Jones has almost certainly screeched it into a microphone with his signature drunk-leafblower panache. And the president is listening. OK? That’s who’s running things. That’s what we’re dealing with, ladies and gentlemen.
But a fresh and unexpected conspiracy is gripping the Jones camp this week, and this time the supposed puppetmaster is Jones himself. In the thick of a bitter custody battle between Jones and his ex-wife Kelly (who alleges that Jones is “not a stable person” and “wants J-Lo to get raped”), Jones’s lawyer has made the surprising claim that his client is “playing a character” and “is a performance artist” and therefore can’t be held accountable for his on-air behaviour and ideas, or how they might impact his children.
Alex Jones, according to Alex Jones, isn’t the real Alex Jones. He’s just playing a character, exploiting his audience’s prejudices for fame and money (you know, like a really great dad would do!). He doesn’t actually mean it. But where does that leave his listeners?
That means that Jones was just playing a character when he claimed that the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11, and, even earlier, that the US government was behind the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Jones was only goofing around when he accused Obama of staging the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 small children and seven adults were murdered, so that the government could justify taking all our guns away (which they still haven’t done – weird!). It was Jones the character, not Jones the person, who insisted that the dead children and their grieving parents were paid actors, Jones the “performance artist” who galvanised an army of internet sleuths to hound and harass said grieving parents for evidence of the “false flag” operation. Good one!
It was a particularly fine piece of performance art when Jones joined in the transparently fictitious furore known as “Pizzagate”, a conspiracy theory manufactured by white supremacist Trump supporters claiming that John Podesta’s leaked emails contained evidence of a child sex ring operating out of several pizza restaurants, after which a man barged into a DC pizzeria with a big rifle and nearly shot everyone, including children, because he thought children were in danger. Classic Jones! Give that guy an arts grant! (Oh, wait. Those won’t exist anymore.)
There’s something very faintly relatable about a true believer. I can understand why a person would want to believe in something more – life is hard, and boring, and cruel, and then you die, so why not indulge your fantasies of lizard people in the White House and gay frogs in the water supply? It’s Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s a club, a little exclusive, something to belong to. But knowingly leveraging the bigotries of the lonely and paranoid to expand your media empire – and, in the process, traumatising mourning families, nearly getting people shot, and helping to elect a tyrant who may destroy the earth either through war or environmental collapse or both – is a degree of cynical greed that’s difficult to fathom.
We don’t know which is the lie: whether Jones is just a guy playing an outlandish character or if he’s a delusional monster contorting himself toward normalcy to win a court case. It doesn’t really matter. Whether he means them or not, his words and influence have the same impact. Presumably, Jones is doing this because he loves his kids. Well, immigrants love their kids too, as do Muslims, and the parents of Sandy Hook, and the still-shattered families of 9/11. Gay people love their kids. People eating pizza love their kids. To know what it’s like to love someone like that, so much that you’d give up everything to keep them in your life, and then to actively strive to rip other families apart for profit or attention or power – that’s about as demonic as it gets.