Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones has been on the air spewing ridiculous lies for over 20 years, and publishes his bizarre opinions on his website Infowars. Despite the fact that his theories are obviously total nonsense, he has racked up a huge following, and millions of fans tune into his show. One fan in particular is especially troubling – Cheeto-In-Chief himself, Donald Trump. In 2015, Trump appeared on his show and told the host ‘Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.’ Trump agrees with Jones that the press is ‘the enemy of the people’ and several of his nonsensical tweets have been based on Infowars articles. According to Jones, ‘Mr. Trump was an Infowarrior before I was born.” Last Spring Trump, almost unbelievably, announced to a crowd in California that the drought was a myth perpetrated to protect a fish, a theory that Jones seems to have originated in this video. At a time when Trump and Bannon are trying to foster hostility and mistrust between the press and the White House, Jones is one of the sole media people Trump seems to be listening to.
So what kind of ‘fake news’ is the most powerful dude in the US being fed? We’ve rounded up some of Alex Jones more dangerous crackpot theories.
1. Lady Gaga’s Satanic Ritual
According to Jones, what appeared to us as Gaga calling for diversity during the Super Bowl half-time show was actually much more sinister. In a video posted to his Facebook, he said: ‘She wears meat suits and does all these rituals—Madonna does it too—and the organizers of the Super Bowl are deciding to defile America and break our will by having us bow down to this. They say she’s going to stand on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling everyone in a big swarm. To just condition them to say, ‘I am the goddess of Satan, ruling over you with the rise of the robots, in a ritual of lesser magic’.”
2. The Government Is Controlling The Weather
Jones attributes natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes to government manipulation of the weather, claiming they’ve used electromagnetic waves to create and steer superstorms. According to him, ‘Of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on. We had floods in Texas like 15 years ago, killed 30-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.’ Infowars has accused High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) of creating Hurricane Sandy, a rumor which gained so much traction that the University of Alaska Fairbanks held an open house to show that HAARP was ‘not capable of mind control.’
3. #Pizzagate
Jones was also one of the proponents of #Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta ran an underground child sex ring in Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington D.C. The theory imagined food-related code words in the leaked Podesta emails, like ‘cheese pizza’ meaning ‘child pornography.’ Jones pushed the hashtag #Pizzagate, stating ‘Pizzagate is real’ and encouraged his listeners to ‘go investigate it for yourself.” When one such person took an AR-15 to the restaurant to do just that, Jones removed all Pizzagate-related content from his website. Not only was the Pizzagate conspiracy absolutely ridiculous, it also goes to show the dangerous implications of this kind of propaganda, especially when white guys with guns are listening.
4. 3 Million Voted Illegally In The Election
Despite the fact that voter suppression is actually a lot more widespread and damaging to democracy than voter fraud, Jones caught Trump’s eye with his claims that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the election. In an article he stated that “Virtually all of the votes cast by 3 million illegal immigrants are likely to have been for Hillary Clinton, meaning Trump might have won the popular vote when this number is taken into account.” This prompted Trump to tweet that he had “’won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally’. This theory has been widely debunked, not that Jones or Trump let little things like facts get in the way of their self-serving narratives.
5. Obama And Clinton Are Possessed By Demons.
In October of last year, before the election, Jones went on a bizarre rant, calling Hillary a demon and claiming her and Obama smell like sulfur. In a pretty extreme case of a dude being absolutely petrified by the idea of a woman in power, he described Hillary as “an abject, psychopathic, demon from Hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to try to destroy the planet. I’m sure of that, and people around her say she’s so dark now, and so evil, and so possessed that they are having nightmares, they’re freaking out.”
6. Beyoncé Is “Funded By The” CIA To Cause Mayhem.
We’ve seen some pretty problematic reactions to Beyonce and Lemonade in the past year, but nothing like Jones’ theory that she’s being paid by the CIA to destroy America. In another nonsensical video, he decries Beyonce’s making “people go out and act like maniacs, it’s happening, and try to start a race war in this country. And this is just to get people to act like total morons, so they can basically get beat up, arrested, and put in jail. …And so people that are like, “Yeah, Beyonce. Smash the police. Smash the men.” This is to get us all at each other’s throats, when we’re all Americans getting screwed over by the NSA, and the foreign banks and derivatives. We’re all getting our kids attacked and aborted, and shot up with vaccines and GMOs. We’re all in this together.”
7. 9/11 Was An Inside Job
Jones calls himself the ‘founding father’ of the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ and has found an ally in Trump, who speculated in a TV interview on September 11, 2001, that there may have been bombs detonated in the World Trade Center. ‘He was there day one saying what I was saying on the radio at the exact same time.’ Jones said of Trump, and “That’s why Donald Trump’s so real. That’s why Donald Trump is so amazing. I’ve been told by people that have known him for 40-plus years that Donald Trump is aware of the entire program and is basically just been waiting for the American people to wake up so the time was right to restore this republic.”
Not that we need more reasons to be terrified these days, but the fact that Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief is cozying up to this dangerous propagandist is scary af.
Top Photo: Philip Nelson
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