In this post-Pepe age, doing it for the lulz has become the last refuge of political cowards. And, to no one’s surprise, now that his personal life is under threat, Alex Jones is as quick to shed his conspiratorial persona as a snake to shed its skin. This comes courtesy of Business Insider, which reports that an attorney representing Jones in a Texas custody battle has claimed that Jones is “playing a character“ when he does things like call the shooting deaths of 20 young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School “a giant hoax” and mock their mourning families, suggest vaccines are part of a “soft kill” campaign to “cull” the population, and claim that the American government is “encourag[ing] homosexuality with chemicals” in order to bring on “the collapse of civilization.”
Jones’ attorney goes on to say that Jones “is a performance artist,” basically calling his followers gullible marks being manipulated by a con man. (As if Yoko Ono hasn’t suffered enough indignities already, now she has to be compared to this jagoff?) Comparing the off-duty Jones to his raving online presence, his attorney claims, would be like judging Jack Nicholson based on his Joker character in Tim Burton’s Batman.
A more accurate comparison would be Stephen Colbert’s performance as ”Stephen Colbert” on The Colbert Report, but even that gives Jones an unearned benefit of the doubt. Colbert is a comedian who made clear that his show was satire, whereas a search on Jones’ website turns up pages and pages of results claiming to expose the “truth” behind everything from Sweden to Oprah Winfrey. His “about” page says he’s a “journalist” who is “SEEKING THE TRUTH AND EXPOSING THE SCIENTIFICALLY ENGINEERED LIES OF THE GLOBALISTS AND THEIR ULTIMATE GOAL OF ENSLAVING HUMANITY.” (Caps original.) If he’s ever said “j/k guys, you don’t think I actually believe any of this stuff right?,” he’s buried it pretty deep.
For her part, Jones’ ex-wife, who is seeking full custody of their three children, doesn’t think he’s joking. In her testimony at a pre-trial hearing as reported in The Austin American-Statesman, she said, “He’s not a stable person. He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped,” expressing her concern that “he broadcasts from home” and “the children are there, watching him broadcast.” Ever the empath, Jones said on his show yesterday that Sasha and Malia Obama are not actually Barack Obama’s children, the day before his own custody trial was to begin.