American Monster — Alex Jones
Eleventh in a series about US criminals accelerating global fascism
“Alex Jones is a scum sucking low life dirt bag who deserves his place in hell.”—Fred Guttenberg, father of a 14-year-old Parkland shooting victim, Oct. 12, 2022
When Alex Jones was ordered to pay $965 million to the grieving families of Sandy Hook victims that he tormented for years with cruel, psychopathic lies, he didn’t stop. The cruelty continued, as he moved the target to the parents of Parkland shooting victims and Uvalde shooting victims with more emotional brutality on his Infowars show, all while encouraging his audience to buy his ‘manly’ pills.
Fred Guttenberg, who suffered the loss of his daughter Jamie in the Parkland, Florida, massacre and became an advocate for gun control, wrote that Alex Jones “deserves his place in hell”.
He should know.
Guttenberg was just in court last month, as one of his radicalized tormenters received a criminal conviction for subjecting Guttenberg to the most vile, hateful cyberstalking messages I have ever read.
James Catalano, 62, sent more than 200 menacing, unspeakable messages to Guttenberg between December 2021 and July 2022. He was sentenced to a year in federal prison for tormenting Guttenberg, still in mourning over the loss of his daughter. Many of the messages can only be described as pure evil.
Catalano, a gun-loving man from Fresno, California, will not be allowed to listen to Infowars upon his release from federal prison. He will only be allowed to use his computer for work, and is required to participate in anger control and mental health treatment.
But what about other radicalized people, who listen to Alex Jones deliver lies to their brain each day? What about the grieving families who continue to be harmed by Jones? Who will be the next target?
“Six-year-old Noah Pozner was killed by the Sandy Hook shooter, but his family became a victim of Alex Jones.”—Frontline PBS, United States of Conspiracy
Sandy Hook victim Noah Pozner’s father, Lenny Pozner, like Fred Guttenberg, has been subjected to vicious threats. A stalker who believed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a ‘hoax’ was sentenced to prison for tormenting Pozner, who is a dedicated activist in the combatting of conspiracy theories. He explained that this “is not a game that’s online, and there are actual consequences for someone who steps over the line.”
Pozner’s stalker, Lucy Richards — an avid InfoWars follower — admitted she was part of an online community who believed the Newtown shooting was staged and the victims and their grieving families were actors — a cruel lie sold to millions by Alex Jones from his studio in Austin, Texas.
‘Conspiracy Without the Theory’
The former cable access host turned American monster built his following on ‘conspiracy without the theory’ — as ‘A Lot of People Are Saying’ author Nancy Rosenblum said. But when he went all in on the grieving Sandy Hook families — calling them ‘crisis actors’ — his wife of eight years, Kelly Jones, said she had enough. The mother of his three children divorced Jones, and after the Sandy Hook billion-dollar verdict was read, she said she hoped the families “would receive every penny.”
‘More Important Than the Truth’ — Peddling Outrage with Unhinged Rants
In the Frontline PBS documentary United States of Conspiracy, BBC filmmaker Jon Ronson said that Jones was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and that he believed that was why he was able to lie without conscience.
“People with NPD don’t need to care as much about the truth and society as other people do,” he said. “They consider themselves more important than the truth.”
From anti-government conspiracies to ‘9/11 truther’ lies, to the Obama ‘birther’ lie, to home-made videos that look like QAnon psyops, if you zoom out and look at Jones’ catalog of conspiracy, it’s pure Russian propaganda.
Jones is another American traitor furthering the Kremlin’s objective to overthrow our country from the inside, another bibulous useful idiot.—hsc
It’s not surprising that he paired up with Roger Stone to push Kremlin-asset Trump on his viewers in 2016. Returning to the Infowars.com output in the runup to the 2016 election is difficult for me, because misogyny was the blunt instrument being used to torment Hillary Clinton and turn people away from her and toward Trump.
“(Hillary) is an abject psychopathic demon from hell, that as soon as she gets into power will destroy the planet… this women is danger. She is a demon. This is Biblical… The Russians are scared of her... She sleeps in the same room with that creepy weirdo woman, whose mother wears a hood over her head… Hillary is into creepy weird sick stuff… Imagine how bad she smells… I’m told there’s a rotten smell around Hillary… like sulphur.”—Alex Jones, Oct. 10, 2016
Trump & Jones were united by misogyny and their willingness to lie to the masses on the record.
“Hillary is the founder of ISIS, along with Obama.”—Alex Jones, 2016
“(Obama) founded ISIS, and I would say the co-founder is crooked Hillary.”—Donald Trump, 2016
As my podcast co-host High Fidelity told Bette Dangerous:
“Alex Jones isn’t just a propagandist. He’s a Russian officer in a military grade psychological operation to overthrow American democracy. He is a fear monger and a smear merchant, attacking innocent Americans to spread lies and criminally defame decent people. That is his primary mission, his standard operating procedure- attack the people, attack the institutions, attack his country. His lies etch themselves like acid into the minds of his countrymen and turns citizens into weapons of social destruction.
“It is no coincidence he was at the forefront of activity on January 6th, 2021. He was ordered there by his superiors, as he readily admits. And as a secondary hustle, he supports his criminal operations through shady online sales of snake oil. He is a conman. He is both a grifter and a threat. He is a soulless Captain Elmer Gantryovich burning down the country he claims to love while shilling a mountain of scientifically questionable elixirs and sewer water tonics for whatever ailments he has fear-seared into his audience’s broken minds.”
Jones’ Infowars website published over one thousand articles from RT, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlet blocked in the US.
Jones has been praised by Alexander Dugin as a ‘hero’, who “exposed the war crimes of Hillary Clinton.” Dugin, a fascist extremist, has repeatedly called for America’s destruction. He was platformed by Jones who interviewed him on InfoWars in 2017 and is backed by US traitors who parrot his attacks on Western liberalism — many of whom have been featured in the American Monster series.
American Monsters: And Then There Were Ten
***The American Monster series and accompanying podcasts are for paid members. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.*** And then there were ten… You will find the first ten reports from the American Monster series in the order in which they were written. Audio versions for members of each print report can be found in the podcast section.
As I have been investigating this series, each ‘monster’ has disinformation in common — an eager willingness to lie to the American people for profit and to hide their criminality, each in service to foreign enemy states, while wrapping themselves in the US flag and calling themselves patriots.
In a recent appearance on the Russian propaganda show, Full Contact, with Putin’s main propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, Jones delivered 45-minutes worth of Russian propaganda, helping to further the mafia state’s talking points around the war in Ukraine.
Jones is a folk hero in Russia, appearing on the orthodox propaganda platform Tsargrad — created by a former Fox News and ‘Hannity’ producer Jack Hanick, who was arrested in London for violating sanctions by working with the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.
Along with his performances on RT, Jones regularly pushes Dugin’s ‘authoritarian globalist elites’ rhetoric, as he did on Solovyov’s show in September.
He also platforms anti-semites.
Lest we forget, he famously gave Ye an hourlong interview where the rapper praised Hitler and told anti-semitic ‘jokes’.
He’s a goddamned menace.
He continues to hawk his supplements, without any scientific evidence because of course he does. In 2020, he received a cease and desist letter from the FDA to stop selling unproven COVID treatments on his websites — the same year he went around the country bullhorning pandemic conspiracies.
As the Biden 2020 campaign’s lead cyberthreat analyst Jackie Singh told Bette Dangerous:
“Alex Jones, the pied piper of lost souls — he’s the boogeyman which forms when we all decide together to ignore our collective responsibility towards one another.”
‘Violence IRL’
Most critically, as I noted in the lede, Jones’ violent rhetoric can be linked to violence irl. Jones was one of the most vocal promoters of the Pizzagate psyop — lies about Hillary Clinton using a pizza parlor for child trafficking and worse. He even cried about the make-believe kids in the pretend pedophile ring.
“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said on video four days before the 2016 election. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
He subsequently deleted the video from YouTube.
Recall, that a man named Edgar Welch — radicalized and armed — showed up at the pizza parlor with an assault rifle, believing he was going to rescue children in the basement. There was no basement. He fired shots, before surrendering to police and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Jones walk-backed his Pizzagate claims, under legal threat from the owner of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant. But he never stopped spreading lies about Democrats and child trafficking.
“Jones is an amusing carnival barker so we kind of ignore many of the things that are staring us right in the face about how hateful he is. He has probably done more to further the cause of hate in this country than almost anyone outside of Donald Trump himself.”—Michael Edison Hayden, Southern Poverty Law Center, Guardian
And where is Alex Jones today? In jail — convicted like his Infowars correspondent Owen Shroyer — for his part in the January 6 Insurrection? Sentenced to home detention like Infowars employee Samuel Montoya, who captured footage of the fatal shooting of rioter Ashli Babbitt?
No.
Today, Alex Jones is platforming a Holocaust denier. Jones said he hopes ‘the video goes viral’.
It’s worth noting that America is being attacked by countries that have no freedom — the mafia state of Russia has no free speech — our First Amendment is being weaponized to destroy our country. Monsters like Jones are the frontline of that destruction — a bibulous useful idiot.
Alex Jones helped usher in a new and dangerous era in American politics, one where truth doesn’t matter. Where political opponents treat each other as mortal enemies, where lies and conspiracy theories flourish.”—Frontline PBS
As ‘How Fascism Works’ author Jason Stanley wrote of conspiracy theories and their proliferation in the run up to fascism:
“Fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root.”
In my report, Conspiracy Theories Are Weapons of War, I explained the Orwellian necessity to get people to disbelieve their eyes and ears.
As I reported, Stanley further explained:
“Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space…
“A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence... By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard… The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality... Anyone looking at current U.S. politics, or current Russian politics… would immediately note the presence and political potency of conspiracy theories.”
It is important to point out that Jones has continued to go on Russian propaganda shows even after a warrant was issued for Putin’s arrest. Putin has been charged by the ICC with war crimes for trafficking Ukrainian children. If Jones cared so much about the kids, why would he go on Russian TV, when Putin has an arrest warrant for crimes against kids?
Perhaps he only cares about make-believe kids, who appear in the lies he perpetuates.
Or perhaps continuing to appear on Russian propaganda shows is part of the contract — a deal he made with the devil, or even a sign of desperate times.
At his peak in 2018, Jones’ audience tallied about 1.4 million daily visits to his websites and social media accounts, according to The New York Times. And from 2015 to 18, the Infowars store earned more than $50 million annually, according to a report by the HuffPost.
He has now filed for bankruptcy, but has not stopped telling lie after lie after lie.
Lying is the message, as reporter Masha Gessen has said.
Even after being widely deplatformed, his tentacles still infect the body politic. He still infects the disaffected, gullible to his unique cruelty, his torrent of lies.
I write of monsters, some of them tragic figures, who once had credibility but then lost their way. Jones, who never had credibility, continues his descent into that special place in hell for those who create unreality and force people to live in their lies.
Below, Ukrainian soldier and filmmaker Volodymyr Demchenko, explained on RadPod what happens to Russian propagandists — to liars, in general:
As anti-Putin cartoonist Dan Brown told Bette Dangerous in extremely visceral terms, Jones has infected the internet with ‘intellectual syphillis’:
Alex Jones was the Christopher Columbus of internet conspiracy grift. Like Columbus — who, one theory holds, infected Europe with syphilis after bringing his rapist c**k back from America — Alex Jones similarly infected the internet with intellectual syphilis.
From his 9/11 conspiracies to his Bohemian Grove "exposé," Jones titillated the gullible, and then sucked up their hard-earned dollars by selling them brain tonics, penis pills, weight loss elixirs, and other dubious dietary supplements. But to understand Jones' appeal, you also have to understand something that he admitted to in open court: he is a performance artist. And arguably, a very effective one. Some of the funniest videos I've ever seen on the internet are Jones' insane rants set to music by GenZ mixers. It isn't surprising then that Jones has crossover appeal with the Joe Rogan manly man comedy audience. His friendship with Alex Jones was so integral to the build up of his own audience, in fact, that Rogan once said in a podcast that he'd had a line inserted into his Spotify contract that ensured that no matter what Alex Jones said or did, he couldn't be banned from the Joe Rogan Experience.
This integration of Alex Jones' conspiracy lies with the most popular podcast in the world should be concerning to anyone who cares about the war between truth and disinformation. It's even more concerning when you consider the fact that, despite raging against authoritarian "globalists," the last time Alex Jones was truly critical of Vladimir Putin was in 1999. For some strange reason, the pus from Alex Jones' intellectual syphilis never oozes onto the subject of Vladimir Putin.
Mic drop.
It’s funny how propagandists say one thing in public, and another in depositions.
During a deposition for the Sandy Hook families defamation lawsuit, Jones was forced to expel some reluctant truth.
“I had a chance to believe that children die, and it’s a tragedy,” he said.
Lenny Pozner, the father of six-year-old Noah, who will always be six, because he was murdered at Sandy Hook, told Frontline in 2020:
“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already won, having Alex Jones admit under oath that Noah did die the way it was reported in his school. That’s a victory for me.”
Pozner was interviewed in silhouette, his face obscured, as he continues to be stalked by radicalized people.
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To read the first ten in the American Monster series, including the recent report on Erik Prince, please go here:
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“We just have to see that the battle for democracy is broader. It's deeper.”—David Pepper
“I need people to see they're on the frontline. Wherever you live, if you’re doing this work, you are the frontline.”—David Pepper
“The message should be a fair deal… fairness everywhere.”—Martin Sheil
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“I say a silent prayer of thanksgiving as I walk upon the earth.”-Audrey Peterman.
“May the viral hope for truth and humanity wash away the chaos of these years.”-S.C., Bette community member
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“Non-violent protest is a life-affirming activity as it seeks to promote a more humane society.”-Ellen Zucker
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(Below, Jones booking photo from a 2020 arrest for a DWI)
