Farewell, Alex Jones


Following a decisive purge from mainstream channels, the raving raspberry’s fame and fortune may soon be coming to an end.

 
 
At long last, it looks like Alex Jones and his (Mis)InfoWars empire, built chiefly atop snake oil supplements and workaday credulity, may be going down in flames. After getting the collective boot from major online platforms and being forced to recant many of his outrageous claims and fork out potentially millions in damages, it would seem his hate-filled chickens are finally on the rebound.

And not a moment too soon, either. Performance art or no, the ideas he elevates, many of which are actively harmful, have no place in polite society. I can only assume the social media giants took this long to permaban his accounts because they wanted to navigate the free speech boundaries with a cautious step. But defending freedom of expression shouldn’t come at the expense of the parents of murdered children targeted by his vitriolic tirades, surely?

Jones’ continuity will largely depend on the damage to his income streams once the dust from the mainstream purge and his varied lawsuits settles, though I doubt his shtick can survive on fringe outlets alone. Regardless, everything happening to him as far as I’m concerned is fair dues and a necessary outcome of living in any intellectually mature, self-respecting society worthy of the name. Before the embers settle, I want to say one last thing about this logorrheic lunatic. And then I’ll be OK with never uttering his name again.

What I’ve always found mesmerizing about him, apart from his monomaniacal paranoia and borderline eldritch tragicomedic energy, of course, is that Alex Jones acts exactly as I would expect someone who believes what he believes (or at least claims to believe) to act. I’ve known a good number of folks, many of whom I don’t talk to anymore, who believe the same things Alex Jones rants about on a daily basis, but who, for the most part, seem like average, normal, stable people, provided you don’t get them talking about politics. Jones, on the other hand, expresses those beliefs in a way that seems almost “natural” given their actual content.

Like, if you actually believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag hoax starring paid child actors, or that Hillary Clinton is an interdimensional demon who co-runs a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in DC, how could you possibly be a functioning, stable adult? Why wouldn’t you be someone who spews alt-reich vomit from a rinky dink studio-on-a-budget into a camera operated by a fly-by-night film school dropout? Or don a donkey mask and personate a “Satanist” — Jones-speak for any liberal with political clout — to whip up paranoia about an impending Communist assault? Makes much more sense, honestly.
 

 
Those manic ragegasms that have become a kind of metonym for Jones himself are a fitting manifestation of how crazy you’d have to be in order to buy into the outlandish conspiracy tales peddled on his program. That goblin with a goiter you see waddling around in the studio and on the streets is the precise mental image I conjure every time I hear some of the absurd things many Americans believe in 2018.
 

 
Alas, I know that once Jones is ingurgitated into whatever wormhole he was originally burped out of, there will be anti-intellectual cretins aplenty to take his place, ready and able to spout the same foolishness and charlatanry on repeat. But he will serve as an enduring reminder of the tension that exists between utter psychobabble and reasonable living.

And just so we’re clear, though I’m not one to use ‘evil’ often, telling parents who lost their child to gun violence that Sandy Hook was a hoax is evil incarnate. Cleansing the destructive drivel Alex Jones has unleashed on the world from public spaces is a pittance compared to what that man deserves. If there is a hell for him to go to, let’s hope he ends up in one of Dante’s lower circles.

 

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Feature image credit: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

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