Will America’s conspiracy king finally be silenced? By Tom Leonard.
Jones, a gravelly voiced Texan blowhard who has managed to make a multi-million-dollar business empire out of peddling the most far-fetched fantasies to America’s most gullible people, had finally been brought to book for one of the most insidious of them.
He has claimed for the past decade that the Sandy Hook tragedy, the worst school shooting in U.S. history in which 20 young children and six adults died, was a ‘false-flag’ operation fabricated by the Obama government as a pretext for tightening the country’s gun laws.
Nobody was killed, and both the victims and the bereaved were just actors, Jones told his millions of disciples on his radio show and on his website InfoWars. It is just one of many ludicrous fantasies that he has championed: he’s also accused the U.S. government of fabricating the September 11 terror attacks, the 1969 Moon landing and various mass shootings and bombings in the U.S. …
He has claimed Michelle Obama is actually a man, Lady Gaga carried out a satanic rite during a Super Bowl half-time show and the Pentagon has developed a ‘gay bomb’, allowing the chemicals from it to leak into the water supply so that frogs have turned homosexual.
He helped spread the notorious ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory about senior Democrats running an occult paedophile ring from the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. …
People are getting hurt by Jones:
And yet, as the Sandy Hook trial has shown, there are real victims of his demented lies. The parents who have sued him for defamation say his malicious accusations not only compounded their terrible grief but led to his deluded followers stalking, harassing and threatening them.
After the father of a girl who died at the school committed suicide, Jones claimed he had been murdered, possibly in connection with the official U.S. investigation into Russian election interference. …
Scarlett Lewis, who with Neil Heslin sued Jones in the Texas court to ‘restore the honour’ of their six-year-old son, Jesse, who died at Sandy Hook, testified that Jones’s claims led to ten years of ‘hell’ for them. They had asked the jury to fine Jones and InfoWars so severely that they’d be put out of business.
‘We ask that you send a very, very simple message and that is: Stop Alex Jones,’ said their lawyer in a message on their behalf. ‘Stop the monetisation of misinformation and lies.’ …
Follow the money:
And what a jaw-dropping monetisation it has been. Although Jones had told the court that any award over $2 million ‘would sink us’, after companies he owned filed for bankruptcy protection as soon as the trial began, Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing Sandy Hook parents, revealed that on a single day in 2018, those firms earned $800,000.
A forensic accountant hired by the parents testified that Jones’s businesses are worth up to $270 million, while court records show his InfoWars shop made $165 million from 2015 to 2018.
The thriving online retail business is his big money-spinner — geared towards preparing people for the complete societal collapse he’s long been predicting, it offers strength and stamina-building health and dietary supplements (of dubious merit), body armour and survival gear ranging from vegetable seed packs to $3,000 industrial freeze driers. …
The [2015] divorce case revealed records of Jones’s spending that hardly tallied with his image as a champion of the downtrodden against the rich. The couple’s assets included a $70,000 grand piano, $50,000 worth of firearms, and $752,000 in gold, silver and precious metals. He once bought four Rolex watches in a single day and spent $40,000 on a saltwater aquarium.
Jones insists he’s not in it just for the money and believes everything he says. Critics don’t believe him, saying he has become more vitriolic over the years after realising that the more extreme he became, the more money he made.
Mark Twain: A lie travels half way around the world while the truth is still getting its pants on.
Lies, telling people what they want to hear, is a darned sight more profitable, too.
