The United States doesn’t now have many reasons to celebrate, but they did relish the moment when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was finally brought to heel.
The brash radio personality, who claimed the 2012 tragedy was all a fake and was being sued by the parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, had just learned that his lawyer had made a grave error.
The shock jock’s claims in court that he had never brought up the shootings in any private communications were flatly refuted by the texts, according to the lawyer representing the parents, which strongly suggested the shock jock had lied.
He had unintentionally sent two years’ worth of potentially damaging texts from Jones’s phone to the lawyer.
The infamous motormouth was seen blinking a lot in court camera footage that quickly went viral online as the full scope of the mistake dawned on him.
However, he quickly recovered his composure and argued that the revelation had been made on purpose.
The Texas jury, which has labeled Jones “the most paranoid guy in America” (which is saying something), sentenced Jones to pay $49.3 million (£41 million) in damages for his outlandish allegations about the massacre on Friday.
Jones, a Texan blowhard with a gravelly voice who has amassed a multi-million dollar business empire by selling the most improbable dreams to America’s most credulous citizens, has finally been arrested for one of the most cunning of them.
He has maintained for the last 10 years that the Obama administration staged the Sandy Hook tragedy, the worst school massacre in American history that claimed the lives of 20 young children and six adults, as a “false-flag” operation to justify stricter gun control measures.
Jones informed his tens of millions of followers through his radio program and website InfoWars that no one was really slain and that both the victims and the grieving were simply actors.
He has promoted a number of absurd delusions, including the fabrication of the 1969 Moon landing, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and other mass shootings and bombings in the United States.
His main argument is that governments, financiers, and industrialists are conspiring to establish a satanic, paedophile “New World Order”—a totalitarian global government—both within the United States (where it is known as the “Deep State”) and around the world.
These conspirators are bringing this government closer by fabricating economic crises, developing high-tech surveillance, and engineering hoax terrorist attacks so they can profit from the resulting hysteria.
The apocalyptic nightmare Jones foresees is one of enforced eugenics, militarized police, and secret government internment camps, beginning with low-income white people.
Jones, who asserts that his syndicated radio program has five million daily listeners and that his YouTube videos have 80 million monthly views, maintains that the only way to stop this is for “patriots” to construct bunkers, store up food and ammunition, and buy precious metals.
His primary platform is InfoWars, a website established in 1999 that has grown to become an endless repository for questionable “news” videos and talk shows, including Jones’s own program in which his conspiracy theories are interspersed with enthusiastic pitches for the dietary supplements and survivalist gear he sells on InfoWars.
These supplements have names like “Super Male Vitality” and “Brain Force Plus.”
Although his bizarre claims against the government and big business also find an audience among the anti-establishment Left, his detractors claim that he is ideologically on the extreme Right.
As a “aggressive constitutionalist,” Jones has referred to himself as “glad to be labeled as a thought criminal against Big Brother.”
He is a fervent Trump fan who has said that Left-wingers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are demons that genuinely smell like sulfur.
He has repeatedly shown that he would say anything to grow his following. He has said that Lady Gaga performed a satanic ritual during the Super Bowl halftime show.
The Pentagon created a “gay bomb,” and the chemicals from it leaked into the water system, causing frogs to acquire homosexual tendencies.
He contributed to the dissemination of the infamous “Pizzagate” hoax, which claimed that prominent Democrats were conducting an occult paedophile network out of a restaurant’s basement in Washington, DC.
Many others have just laughed at Jones for years, as Andrew Neil did in 2013 when Jones appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Politics and was told: “You are the worst person I have ever interviewed.” while his guest screamed his bile in the background.
Yet there are actual victims of his insane falsehoods, as the Sandy Hook trial has shown.
The parents who are suing him for defamation claim that in addition to exacerbating their awful loss, his dishonest charges caused his misguided supporters to stalk, harass, and threaten them.
Jones said that the father of a girl who died at the school had been killed, potentially in connection with the official U.S. inquiry into Russian election meddling, after the father of the child committed suicide.
His detractors genuinely hope he won’t have a solution for the significant financial penalty he faces in what is just the first of three cases against him initiated by the families of Sandy Hook victims since he has a conspiracy-laden defense for everything.
Scarlett Lewis claimed that Jones’s assertions caused her and Neil Heslin to endure ten years of “hell” when they sued Jones in a Texas court to “restore the honor” of their six-year-old son Jesse, who died at Sandy Hook.
They had urged the jury to impose penalties on Jones and InfoWars that would render them unprofitable.
Their attorney sent out a statement on their behalf, saying, “We ask that you deliver a very, very simple message and that is: Stop Alex Jones.” Stop making money off of falsehoods and false information.
What a staggering monetization it has been, too. Despite Jones’s warning that a judgment in excess of $2 million “would sink us,” businesses he controlled filed for bankruptcy as soon as the trial started, and Mark Bankston, an attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, disclosed that those businesses made $800,000 in one day in 2018.
Jones’s enterprises are worth up to $270 million, according to a forensic accountant hired by the parents, but according to court documents, his InfoWars store generated $165 million from 2015 to 2018.
His main source of income is his lucrative online retail business, which sells body armor, survival gear, and health and dietary supplements to help people build strength and stamina.
These products range from vegetable seed packets to $3,000 industrial freeze driers, all of which are intended to help people prepare for the total societal collapse he has long predicted.
With his previous spouse Kelly, who filed for divorce in 2015, Jones has three kids. She testified in court during a custody dispute that Jones was “not a stable person” and that their children had to watch him broadcast his insane rants from their house.
He was a “performance artist” who was “playing a character,” in response, according to his attorney.
Records of Jones’s spending were made public by the divorce case, and they did not exactly support his reputation as a champion of the underprivileged against the wealthy.
A $70,000 grand piano, $50,000 worth of weapons, and $752,000 in gold, silver, and precious metals were among the couple’s possessions. He once spent $40,000 on a saltwater aquarium and four Rolex watches in one day.
Jones insists he isn’t just doing it for the money and says he is completely sincere. Critics claim he has grown more virulent over the years after realizing that the more extreme he became, the more money he made, and they refuse to believe him.
He once said, “I’m not a business guy, I’m a revolutionary.” His revolution began in his teenage years when Jones, the affluent dentist’s son from Dallas, began reading books about conspiracies.
He claims that one book in particular, Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy from 1971, which claimed that a group of international bankers actually controlled government policy and had even funded the Russian Revolution, served as an inspiration.
After quitting college, Jones began hosting a viewer call-in program on public access television in Austin, Texas, where he initially honed his broadcasting style of delivering ludicrous conspiracy theories in a loud, obnoxious voice.
His favorite bogeyman was the secretive annual meeting of bankers, economists, and politicians known as the Bilderberg Group.
He relocated to a local radio station in 1996, where he began to issue martial law warnings.
Here is where he first met his wife; at the time, he was sweating tremendously while advertising the station while dressed as a bumblebee.
Despite receiving strong ratings, he was fired three years later because his explosive opinions made it impossible for the channel to get advertisers.
Unfazed, he began broadcasting from his house, utilizing a nursery room with “choo-choo train” wallpaper as a studio for both his InfoWars programs and a radio show that was quickly syndicated on 100 stations.
According to historians, Americans are prone to believing in conspiracies because of a long-standing mistrust of the government that stems from the insurrection against Britain in 1776 and is a result of the large number of immigrants who immigrated to the country to escape repressive regimes.
Nobody could accuse Jones of not taking advantage of that vulnerability. It’s difficult to recall a national catastrophe that he hasn’t attributed to the “Deep State” of America.
The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the 2016 slaying of 49 people in an Orlando gay nightclub, and the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that left 59 dead were all “false-flag” hoaxes involving “crisis actors” that were planned by government officials so they could restrict Americans’ civil liberties, particularly their right to bear arms, he claimed.
“We’re bringing the republic back.” On The Alex Jones Show in 2015, he said, “We’ll never be flawless, but, my God, we’re not going to keep newborns alive and harvest their organs.”
We won’t trade their parts for women’s cosmetics, we said.
We won’t be drinking Pepsi with baby flavoring.
Unfortunately for Jones, his predilection for sensationalism over fact has begun to backfire. Lawsuits against him have been stacking up.
Regarding assertions that its facility in Idaho was “importing migrant rapists” and was to blame for a surge in TB cases in the region, yoghurt producer Chobani sued him and InfoWars for defamation in 2017. Jones apologized on-air after settling the claim for an undisclosed sum.
He paid $50,000 (£41,000) to resolve another defamation action filed by Brennan Gilmore, a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this year.
As a counter-protester at a Far Right demonstration in the city in 2017, Mr. Gilmore was accused on InfoWars of being a CIA agent and aiding in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government after he shared a video of the event online.
Regarding his part in urging Trump supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Jones is also being questioned more and more.
His lawyer irresponsibly disclosed the Sandy Hook family’ text exchanges to Congress, who is now hunting for proof.
Jones and his supporters are already using his most recent court loss as fresh proof that the “Deep State” is trying to get him.
He has at least realized he can no longer depend on the promise of free expression under the U.S. Constitution.
Wesley Ball, a representative for the parents, told the jury, “You have the power to prevent this guy from ever doing it again.” “Send the message that speech is free to others who want to do the same. You pay for lies.
And with more court rulings to come, Alex Jones is in for a very steep charge.