In This Episode
Erin and Alyssa dive into the past of moronic conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. From the conspiracy theory bible that inspired Infowars, to spreading 9/11 false flag propaganda that grew his following, to having vein-popping tantrums that would terrify most cardiologists, to owing the Sandy Hook families 1.4 billion dollars, this may be our most hysterical man-baby-guy yet!
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Sources:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/alex-jones/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meet-alex-jones-175845/
http://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/not-fake-news-infowars-alex-jones-performance-artist-n747491
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/alex-jones/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/us/politics/alex-jones-jan-6-trump.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/25/politics/alex-jones-january-6-plead-fifth
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/11/alex-jones-americas-top-conspiracy-theorist.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/07/alex-jones-infowars-bankruptcy
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/g-s1-24410/alex-jones-infowars-bankruptcy-sandy-hook-judge
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/g-s1-46738/infowars-alex-jones-onion-bankruptcy-judge-sandy-hook
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/alex-jones-bankruptcy-case
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/13/nx-s1-5501648/alex-jones-infowars-receiver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RYT6N4TVrs
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/alex-jones-infowars-store-165-million-1281059/
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/alex-jones-urged-rogan-host-pro-rape-extremist/
TRANSCRIPT
[clip of Alex Jones]: My children aren’t going hungry! I will eat your ass! [laughter]
Erin Ryan: A good dad will show up to other kids’ band concerts. A great dad will eat ass. [music plays] Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the show that picks one F*cking guy making America worse and explains why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Podcast. And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Erin Ryan: Today we’re showcasing a truly hysterical American.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And we don’t mean hysterical like he induces hysterical laughter.
Erin Ryan: Although I have to admit that Alex Jones’ emotional outbursts make for entertaining content, the cynical, whorish agenda behind it make him one of America’s most deserving of a kick in the nuts.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: More than a gentle tap. We need a full on Chris Boswell level punt right to the groin.
Erin Ryan: A kick that splits the uprights from 58 yards out.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He’d probably cry.
Erin Ryan: Alex Jones has cried over much less than having his crotch shattered by a righteous booting. He’s cried so much on camera that if he were a Gilded Age woman, he’d have been institutionalized and issued a medical grade vibrator to calm him down. Don’t worry, we’ll get to see him crying at the end of this episode as a little treat. Alyssa, confronting the sheer volume of stupidity that Alex Jones has unleashed on the world for the last 30 years is daunting. The guy has broadcasted for hours a day most days of the week, for so long that honestly if we wanted we could probably have AI scrape the Infowars archive and generate a brand new, totally artificial Alex Jones. Many have dismissed Alex as a conspiracy-addled moron, a wild-eyed nutbag, a megachurch pastor for racists with lead poisoning [laughter] or a clown. But just because he’s a clown doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Present day Alex Jones can be relied on to make excuses for the corrupt MAGAites, goose stepping America towards fascism. But for most of his career, he was the one questioning authority, ever wary of the U.S. Government. He hated Democrats and Republicans. He was truly one of those both sides are equally bad guys.
Erin Ryan: So how does one go from don’t tread on me conspiracy goon to tread on me daddy Donald Trump bootlicker? Let’s try to figure it out. Alex Jones was born on February 11, 1974 and raised in Rockwall, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. He apparently had a normal life. He was on the football team. He had a normal family except for the fact that his dad was a dentist and a lot of weirdos have dads who are dentists.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Including bad weirdo Mark Zuckerberg and good weirdo Miles Davis.
Erin Ryan: Great dentist dad trivia, Alyssa. So here’s an important thing to know about Alex Jones. He is full of shit. And so any story he tells about himself where he looks good should be taken with a grain of salt.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: F*cking guys love a fib that makes them sound cool and tough.
Erin Ryan: In a 2011 Rolling Stone profile, Jones told the following tall tale. When he was a teenager, he was radicalized by witnessing the corruption in his local police department. He said that when he was a sophomore, he mouthed off to the police who had pulled him over and accused them of dealing drugs to kids during a school assembly. That’s why his family moved to Austin, he says. And not long after the Joneses left town, the police department was busted for exactly the crimes that Alex had accused them.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: As Dakota Johnson would say, actually, that’s not the truth, Ellen.
[clip of Dakota Johnson]: Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen. [laughter]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: A CNN deep dive into Jones from 2022 found what probably caused Alex Jones’ dad to uproot the family and move cities was Jones got his ass kicked.
Erin Ryan: The ass-kicking started with Alex mouthing off about the girlfriend of another football player who was appropriately named Bubba. Alex had slammed Bubba’s head into the floor of a classroom, and Bubba suffered nine skull fractures and permanent hearing damage.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How did he slam his head onto the floor? Like a pile driver?
Erin Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Like the wrestling move. So Bubba is understandably pissed, and after he got out of the hospital, he and another student jumped Alex at a party at one point hitting him in the face with a rake.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s like if professional wrestling were real.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, so this fucked up Alex’s teeth so badly that his dentist dad had to perform, quote, “extensive surgery on his son.” And that seems like the reason they left Rockwell. It wasn’t because Alex Jones was too badass for the cops to handle. Oh, and that story about the police being busted for dealing drugs, that did happen. Two years before Alex Jones’ dad moved the family to Austin, so the school assembly accusation probably didn’t happen.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Alex was also known to have occasional bizarre outbursts as a teen, stomping around his neighborhood shirtless, chanting and muttering about the devil.
Erin Ryan: Who among us, Alyssa? Football wasn’t the only brain damage causing pastime that Alex Jones enjoyed as a teenager. Years later, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jones would brag that he and his friends used to get high by choking each other out when they were kids.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay, so in addition to brain damage, Jones says he was also influenced by the 1971 book None Dare Call It a Conspiracy, which was written by former George Wallace speechwriter, John Birch Society member, and certifiably insane racist and anti-Semite Gary Allen.
Erin Ryan: The crazy thing Alex Jones and None Dare Call It a Conspiracy is that Alex Jones wasn’t so much influenced by the book as he cribbed his entire worldview from it. Infowars is basically None Dare Call It A Conspirasy live. Allen’s book claims, among other things, that a group of powerful quote-unquote “insiders” are in control of world governments, not elected officials, and that Jewish bankers and families like the Rothschilds finance communist takeovers of Christian governments around the world.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Ah, there’s the anti-Semitism.
Erin Ryan: You knew it was coming, Alyssa.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I knew it.
Erin Ryan: None Dare Call It a Conspiracy pits freedom and Western-style democracy against communism and enslavement. It also argues that the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the Federal Reserve Bank are tools of these globalists and that their ultimate goal is to abolish individual nations and realign all governments into a single totalitarian New World Order.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wait wait. So is that where the phrase new world order came from?
Erin Ryan: Yes, it is.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh.
Erin Ryan: Allen writes that this will be accomplished incrementally through international alliances and trade agreements.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Like NATO?
Erin Ryan: Yep. Another tool that so-called globalists would use with staging disasters and tragedies, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, et cetera. None Dare Call it a Conspiracy claims that everything is by design. Nothing is by accident. In fact, people who doubt that a group of powerful elites are orchestrating everything are denigrated as naive accidentalists.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Well, I’ll be. So that’s where the whole false flag thing comes from. A conspiracy bestseller from the 1970s.
Erin Ryan: What, Alyssa, you think a guy who had been bonked on the head and recreationally choked out as much as Alex Jones would be coming up with that shit himself?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I frankly couldn’t have imagined where this was all coming from. Toward the end of his senior year of high school in 1993, law enforcement raided the compound belonging to the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas. The government alleged that the sect had been stockpiling weapons and abusing children, and a series of violent overtures by both sides eventually led to the compound being engulfed in flames. Some say that the sect members set the blaze themselves. Others claim that the government set the fire. Regardless, when it was all over, more than 80 people, including two dozen children, were dead.
Erin Ryan: It was a boondoggle that influenced the conspiracy fringe for years to come.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The raid was massively influential to Alex’s worldview, which was about to be issued its first bullhorn.
Erin Ryan: Alex Jones, like so many American men who would go on to great media success, armed with a high school education and a big fat mouth, sought his fortune on a local public access channel. Yes, there was a time when Austin was actually weird instead of corporate weird.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 1995, a right-wing terrorist named Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. McVeigh had planned the bombing in retaliation for the Branch Davidian raid, as well as for another ATF raid gone bad in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Erin Ryan: But Alex Jones told his viewers that Timothy McVeigh couldn’t have done it. That the Oklahoma City bombing was orchestrated by the U.S. Government in order to provide pretext for a military-style crackdown. That’s right, say it with me, friends. A false flag.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Something tells me we’re going to be seeing that phrase a lot.
Erin Ryan: In 1996, Jones started hosting a radio show called The Final Edition on Austin’s KJFK 98.9. He gave his show that name because we’re supposed to think that his opinions are so dangerous that jack-booted globalists might kick down the studio door at any time and drag him to the New World Gulag. The Branch Davidian raid, and his theory that it wasn’t a botched law enforcement raid, but rather a targeted killing of women and children, was Alex’s hyperfixation. In 1998, Jones’ listeners raised more than $90,000 to build a new church for the religious sect. Jones was so consumed with wild theories about the Branch Davidian raid that it eventually got him fired from the radio station in 1999, despite the fact that he’d tied for first place in a vote for Austin’s favorite talk radio host that year thanks to content like this.
[clip of Alex Jones]: Hello caller, you’re on the air.
[clip of radio caller]: Yes, Alex, how are you doing?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Pretty good! [laughter]
[clip of radio caller]: I was just kind of curious, if it’s true that the police can have laser or infrared beams, if you want to call it, and they can project those into your house to basically—
[clip of Alex Jones]: Yeah, the Austin Police Department, last time I heard it, has 20 units with infrared. If you have enough of a heat source in your house, it’ll pick up the heat source and show a signature. It’s called FLARE, it’s infrared or heat signature. Black helicopters are being used for surveillance of the public by sheriff’s departments and police departments around the country.
Erin Ryan: Like, if I were really stoned on Halloween and it was 1997, I would be like—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It has like.
Erin Ryan: —I’m into this. You’ll notice in these early clips that he hasn’t yet adopted that Beetlejuice voice he’s now known for.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones wasn’t let go from the radio station because he was too dangerous to be on the air. It was that it was tough for the station to sell advertising against the show.
Erin Ryan: What, Alyssa, doesn’t hearing a man yell nonstop about people being burned alive in an ATF raid make you want to buy a new car?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Alex’s firing didn’t stop the march of his crazy. That’s because he and his wife Kelly had started the company Infowars in 1999, which meant Alex was his own boss.
Erin Ryan: At first, Infowars was a humble little outfit that produced conspiracy fringe films available to purchase through the mail. One of those films was, of course, about the Waco raid on the Branch Davidian compound. It was called America: Wake Up (or Waco). He also hosted a radio show from Infowar’s HQ, aka his house. It’s hard to overstate the volume of content that Alex Jones put out into the world. If I started watching Alex Jones hosted programming from the beginning, I’d probably die before I got all the way caught up. It is like how I feel when I try to get into the extended Star Wars universe.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: By the early 2000s, Jones was syndicated on more than 100 radio stations across the country. In 2000, he dipped his toes into political waters, announcing he’d run for the state representative in Texas District 48, but then backed out before things got serious. What a turn his life could have taken if he’d become a member of Congress.
Erin Ryan: Honestly he’d probably be the head of the judiciary committee by now. [laughter] One thing I’ve seen about Alex Jones is that he predicted 9/11, but he totally didn’t. People say that he did because on July 25, 2001, he said on his show that he thought that globalists in the U.S. Government would stage a terror attack on American soil, possibly at the World Trade Center in New York, as a pretext for declaring martial law. He also mentioned Osama bin Laden and urged his viewers to call Congress, tell them we know the government is planning terrorism. Not sure what Congress could do about it but.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: So he put any national security type word into one sentence and went for broke.
Erin Ryan: Exactly. But, as pointed out by the excellent Alex Jones-focused podcast, Knowledge Fight, Alex Jones gets credit for predicting 9/11 largely because Alex Jones gave himself credit for predicting 9/11. Because on the actual day of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jones, like the rest of us, had no fucking clue what had just happened.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: 9/11 was a tragic, terrible day, apparently only to be made worse by Alex Jones I’m guessing.
Erin Ryan: On the actual day, he blamed the American government and the British royal family, surmising that the attack had been a, say it with me [both speaking] a false flag. A false flag meant to boost the value of the euro. He later decided that no it couldn’t have been the British Royal Family, it was probably some other miscellaneous Europeans working in tandem with the American Government.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Mmm, still wrong.
Erin Ryan: The knowledge fight hosts observed that Alex Jones’ so-called prediction sounded an awful like a combination of two things that predated the prediction. Conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper’s June 28, 2001 prediction that Osama bin Laden would be blamed for a terror attack on American soil and the X-Files spin-off TV show The Lone Gunman, which featured somebody flying a remote-control airplane into the World Trade Center and first aired in March of 2001.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Once again, not an original thought in that knocked around noggin.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, many critics of Jones have noticed that Alex Jones, like the current occupant of the White House, seems very easily influenced by the last thing he watched on television or the last person he listened to. 9/11 was perhaps the greatest thing to ever happen to Alex Jones. At least as far as his career was concerned. In the years after the attacks, his audience grew exponentially. Alex even got to pal around with Charlie Sheen.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones appeared in dozens of 9/11 conspiracy-related videos and films, including the 2007 documentary Loose Change, where Jones claimed that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by a controlled demolition, not by the airplanes crashing into them. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, if you will.
Erin Ryan: He also claimed that it was the US government that was behind the attacks, not Osama bin Laden, who he claims was framed. Wait! It’s time for a [both speaking] FALSE FLAG. Globalists perhaps affiliated with the Bush family, or maybe not blew up the World Trade Center. Those planes were just for decoration, I guess? And Osama bin Laden was unjustly accused of a crime he didn’t commit. This marks the first and only time Alex Jones would defend a muslim.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah, wouldn’t it have been more convenient for his white nationalist sensibilities if the world Trade Center had been attacked by Islamic extremists?
Erin Ryan: When it comes to trying to figure out why Alex Jones does what he does. Remember, mentally he’s not playing chess, he’s playing rock-em-sock-em robots. Jones’s conspiracy-mongering got a lot of attention. Not long after Loose Change debuted, Jones and a bunch of his fans bum-rushed a Geraldo Rivera broadcast in New York City. In this clip, you can hear Alex Jones yelling, 9/11 was an inside job into a bullhorn, and you can see the pain in Geraldo’s eyes.
[news clip]: Surrounded by an activist radical, I don’t know, communist group, I don’t who the hell they are. But let me go on to our planned program. First, he said he was going to step down after allegedly approaching an undercover cop for sex. Uh, as this group of misfits behind me continue their, uh, they’re chanting, oh, I wish I could go to Geraldo. Geraldo! [overlapping voices] Yes, let’s go to, uh… Mark Garagos. I think it’s quieter in Los Angeles.
Erin Ryan: This resulted in Jones being charged with unauthorized use of a megaphone. Which I didn’t realize was a crime.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones also appeared in other 9/11 related media like Endgame, Blueprint for Global Enslavement, and Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11.
Erin Ryan: While Alex Jones fancies himself a bit of a Nostradamus, unfortunately, because most of his predictions have been made to a video camera, we have plenty of video evidence that he’s actually full of shit, one of the wrongest bitches in the game. So here’s a partial list of things that Alex Jones predicted that were wrong according to a Reddit community for Alex Jones’ haters. In June 2007, Jones predicted government forces were going to nuke Chicago, quote, in the next month. That’s right! [both speaking] A false flag. In 2008, Jones predicted that the US dollar would decrease in value by 90% before the presidential election, that the government was going to mandate a national draft, and that all pensions would disappear by 2010. None of those things happened.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones’ poor prediction record during the financial crisis continued into 2009 when he predicted three separate times in February of that year that they would stage another 9/11 before August. And blame it on somebody else, that’s right. [both speaking] False flag.
Erin Ryan: That’s right. By the end of February, Jones had moved the goalposts again, clarifying that the attack would be happening, quote, “by the end of the year.” He also predicted that there would be a new world war started within the next few years and that the government would turn off the internet by 2011. God, if they had turned off the Internet by 2011—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No internet.
Erin Ryan: Maybe they should have. In 2010, he said that he feared being killed or sent to prison and that there’d be a staged assassination attempt against President Obama blamed on, you guessed it, somebody else. [both speaking] False flag. Thee imagined assassination, he predicted, would be blamed on a 9/11 truther, who was also an Islamicist with ties to the tea party. Also, within 16 months, at least 15 European nations would collapse.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay, well, in 2015 he predicted that the roads would be turning into robot roads within a decade, and famously he freaked out about chemicals being added to the water to turn the frogs gay, which led to one of the most iconic moments in broadcast history.
[clip of Alex Jones]: What do you think tap water is? It’s a gay bomb, baby. And I’m not saying people didn’t naturally have homosexual feelings. I’m even getting into it, quite frankly. I mean, give me a break. You think I am like, oh, shocked by it, so I’m up here bashing it because I don’t like gay people? I don’t like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay! Do you understand that? Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Crap.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I mean, I feel like if there were gay frogs, we’d have known from someone other than Alex Jones.
Erin Ryan: Probably, yeah.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones’ conniption was, so inspiring that it spawned several dance remixes. [music plays]
Erin Ryan: Wow. Oh my God. Alyssa though, be honest, if that were playing at a wedding dance, you would run to the dance floor.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I would do the gator.
Erin Ryan: I would one of those like Russian kicking dances and I’ve never done one of those in my life.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This is part of the conspiracy handbook that predicts they, i.e. The globalists, were dabbling in population control. He said that transgenderism is a part of a CIA plan to depopulate humanity, but it’s also part of an evil pedophile plan to sexualize and destroy children.
Erin Ryan: I don’t get it, Alyssa. If the evil globalist transgender people like having sex with kids so much, then why are they taking such extreme measures to make sure that fewer of them are born? It’s a bad plan.
[AD BREAK]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2018, Jones said conservatives would all get kicked off talk radio, and conservatives would be banned from the internet, and that law firms in DC were conspiring together to end the First Amendment. He claimed that FBI Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was a child rapist and a demon and threatened to shoot him.
[clip of Alex Jones]: They’d let Mueller rape kids in front of people, which he did. [laughter] Mueller covered up for a decade for Epstein, kidnapping kids, flying them on sex planes. Some kids as young as seven years old, reportedly, with big perverts raping them to frame people. I mean, Mueller is a monster, man. That’s a demon. I will take down or I’ll die trying. So that’s it. It’s gonna happen. We’re gonna walk out in the square, politically, at high noon, and he’s gonna find out. Well, he makes you move, man. Make them move first, and then it’s gonna happen. Mmm! Politically, you’re gonna get it!
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, he is a exhausting he is like a nail through your head.
Erin Ryan: This is a good one. In 2020, Jones predicted that America was going to ban vaginal births.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Stop.
Erin Ryan: Why? Why, you may ask? Well, Alyssa, I’m going to tell you because Alex Jones thinks that C-sections reduce the brain volume and IQ of babies, and they’re cheaper for hospitals to do. In April 2020, he predicted that they would kill Donald Trump in the next couple of weeks and say that he had a stroke. That 300 million people would die over the next few years. He suggested that a Jewish space laser had started wildfires in California.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Is that where Marjorie Taylor Greene got that rumor?
Erin Ryan: Could be, could be. Jones was having a normal one in 2021 when he predicted that they were going to shut everything down and blow up federal buildings and poison the water supply. They would also find the time in 2021 to fly 112,000 Afghani people into the U.S. And that those Afghanis would do so much terrorism that it would give the government an excuse to declare martial law. God, I’ve heard this one already, which will give the government an excuse to ship American citizens to a COVID death camp.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: One way to tell that Alex Jones is lying, besides when his mouth is moving, is when he starts using specific numbers and timelines. He’s like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or like the Welsh paratrooper I dated who it turned out was neither Welsh nor a paratroop in that way.
Erin Ryan: I have some follow-up questions on that I hope you will take them offline. And of course, Alex, who is not a creative or particularly smart person, was constantly recycling some of his frequent flyers, like the idea that the government was setting up FEMA camps in which to imprison and enslave citizens, the government using staged mass shootings as an excuse to seize citizens’ guns, vaccines are a conspiracy meant to encourage human depopulation, the US government stages natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina somehow?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: If the globalists are so powerful, then why do they need to convince the population to believe them in order to seize power? Why haven’t they just taken it? These seem like very elaborate and difficult to execute schemes. Wouldn’t a straight path to totalitarianism just be easier? Why all the tricks? They can make a goddamn hurricane, but they can’t cancel the constitution?
Erin Ryan: Alyssa! Leave the question asking to Infowars, okay? Despite the fact that Alex Jones was wrong a lot more often than he was right, by 2017 Info Wars was getting an estimated 10 million visitors per month, which is more than many mainstream news outlets like The Economist. Sometimes his broadcasts got more viewers than the nightly news. He was flying so high in 2017 that Megyn Kelly, who was pretending to be normal at the time, interviewed him for NBC News. How can one person be so loudly incorrect about so many things? Well, One possible explanation is all that brain trauma from his youth, but when you layer substance abuse on top of that, well, honey, you got yourself a gay frogs rant.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes, Alex Jones’ well-known drinking problem exudes from most everything he does, like projectile vomit from the back window of a 3 a.m. Uber.
Erin Ryan: Employees of Infowars have reported that Jones is frequently drinking at work. He often appears sloshed out of his mind on his show and during appearances on other people’s shows, like this supercut from one single episode of the Joe Rogan experience.
[clip of Alex Jones]: Hey listen bitches, you may force feed Eddie Bravo a bunch of CNN Fox News shit every morning. But you’re fucking getting the Joe Rogan experience up your fucking ass. We’re gonna have the kids delivered for entertainment they’ll be in the hot tub. A guy getting screwed by a horse. Succulent hot dogs. I’m sending shooters in to shoot people at a pizza place. Psychic vampires stealing the energy from the kids I don’t care if Obama is at a party with 15 dudes. That’s his issue.
[clip of Joe Rogan]: Are you trying to say that Barack Obama is a homosexual?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Same as bi-sexual I just know all this crap.
[clip of Joe Rogan]: Well you get crazy and start ranting.
[clip of Alex Jones]: People won’t listen to me cuz I got too much data! [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Too much data, Erin. There are also rumors that Jones is into the nose candy. You know, the booger sugar, the white lady, yay-o, the queso-blanco.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Now why on earth would anybody suspect that Alex Jones was on cocaine?
[clip of Alex Jones]: We have scored a direct stab in those sons of bitches’ hearts! We gotta keep running the knife in though, folks. We gotta keep running it in there, not worry what they’re doing to us. Just, rrrgh! You wanted to fight, you’re getting it! You wanted overrun us and poison us and take our families and kill us? You will die, not us! Rrrgh.
Erin Ryan: Could be the screaming, could be the tooth grinding, could be the fact that there’s a theory that Alex Jones is secretly a DJ.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: A what?
Erin Ryan: Yeah, so in the background of some videos, he’s in front of fancy DJ equipment, and a YouTube account associated with him has commented on videos of other DJs using their equipment in a way that only a DJ would comment. Now it does seem like it’s one of Alex Jones’ relatives that is the DJ and not Alex, but if the Alex Jones Is a Secret DJ rumor were true, it makes some of his cocaine-y behaviors more excusable. Unfortunately, it does appear that rather than using cocaine to make excellent music, if he is in fact using cocaine, which is a big if, on speculation, purely on how he looks and acts Alex Jones is just using it to be annoying. If he’s not, he’s naturally annoying, without cocaine.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: There’s been speculation that he’s abused other substances as well, based on, well, this video.
[clip of Alex Jones]: Do you understand how good it feels out here right now? Do you see how high I am off being out here? This feels awesome. This feels fantastic. This is what it is to be alive with our ancestors, running around and stuff a lot colder than this, taking animals down and hauling them back to the women with big fires in the caves. Yeah, living. That’s what it’s about. I’m out here bathing in the night. Forest bathing yesterday, this is what’s it’s all about. I don’t need drugs. This. This is what it is to take on the glove to have Hillary attack you and Obama attack you and the communist Chinese attack you and call for your censorship. / There it is right there, right here only over my heart.
Erin Ryan: He put this video up himself. But despite the access to all the illicit substances Jones enjoys as a rich man who hangs around dirtbags, he still sometimes yearns for the simpler highs of his youth. On more than one podcast appearance, he has attempted to goad another adult man into choking him out, like he and his friends used to do when they were kids. During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Jones tried to get Eddie Bravo to choke him out. Eddie Bravo is, I guess, Joe Rogans manservant or something. I mean, I don’t know, Alyssa. I don’t watch the show. I’ve got kids. I got responsibilities. But later on another podcast, Jones got his wish to be choked out by another adult man when jujitsu champ Craig Jones choked him unconscious on the El Segundo podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And then there was the drunk driving arrest. In March, 2020, Jones and his now ex-wife were in a fight. She called the police and Jones got in his car and drove off. Police stopped him and while he blew slightly under the legal limit.
Erin Ryan: Like so close to the legal limit, it’s crazy. The legal limit is 0.08 in Texas, and he blew up 0.076 and a 0.079.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But reeked of booze and failed a field sobriety test. He posted a $3,000 bond and was released and later whined about it on his show.
Erin Ryan: A lack of attention to his health would explain why Alex Jones, at only 51 years old, looks like a big toe with a string wrapped around it tight enough to cut off the blood circulation.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, this one hits close to home. Alex Jones is 51. We are basically the same age.
Erin Ryan: Okay Alyssa, but you are not a hard 51. Jones is a HARD 51. Here are some people who are older than Alex Jones. Winona Ryder. Older than Alex. James Marsden. Idris Elba. Christian Bale.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Hot.
Erin Ryan: Brooke Shields.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Also hot. Okay, that’s not fair. Those are beautiful celebrities.
Erin Ryan: Okay, here’s a non-beautiful celebrity example. Joe Rogan is seven years older than Alex Jones.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Honestly, Rogan reads so much younger.
Erin Ryan: That’s because he’s got the slack-jawed credulity of a 15-year-old C student. [laughter] In addition to showcasing Jones’ emotional dysregulation, as time went on, Infowars became more about selling supplements than it did about anything else. A 2017 analysis by Last Tonight with John Oliver, found that Jones spent about a quarter of his show selling supplements. Here’s the genius of Alex Jones and what makes him one of our most quintessentially American F*cking Guys. His show sells both problems and solutions.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Say more.
Erin Ryan: By that I mean Jones will, say, claim that the government is putting chemicals in the water that threaten male virility. And then he’ll sell a powder that, would you believe it, fixes the problem that he just said the government caused.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It should come as a surprise to nobody that when BuzzFeed news reporters sent the supplements that Joan sells off to a lab to be analyzed, they found that they were basically shitty vitamins with the price jacked up at best.
Erin Ryan: At worst, they contain several times the amount of lead that human beings are supposed to take in per week. See, I told you that lead poisoning would be a factor in the rise of Alex Jones.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It always comes back to the lead. Unsurprisingly, Alex Jones is not known to be a very good boss. Infowars has faced leaks, lawsuits, and accusations that Jones sometimes parades around shirtless and occasionally pantsless, walks up to random employees and demands that they hit him so that he could punch them back. I was accidentally pantsless once on the Kerry campaign but I can assure you the inverse has never happened. [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Oh God.
[AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: Leaked text messages from Jones shows that he seems to have a fair amount of contempt for his viewers. A former employee of Infowars said, quote, “we kind of address the audience as this low IQ, grab onto anything gullible, tribe of very dangerous people.”
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Further evidence suggests that Infowars employees would alter the number of views videos had to make them look more popular. Like we said at the beginning, nothing that Alex Jones says about himself is trustworthy because the man is 90% hot air.
Erin Ryan: Alex Jones is not a very good husband either. According to his ex-wife Kelly, he’s a diagnosed narcissist and a shitty dad. Two years after their 2015 divorce, Kelly asked a court in Texas to alter their custody agreement for the three children that they share. As she said that Jones’ behavior on his show indicated that he was not a fit parent. He was also angling to have their son Rex turned into some kind of mini Alex Jones right-wing Influencer.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, when you say he’s a bad dad, I don’t think you’re being fair. Don’t you remember this video where Jones vowed to eat his neighbors in order to keep his kids alive?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Here’s why I felt so sick. I’ll admit it. I will eat my neighbors. I’m not letting my kids die. I’m just being honest. My super power’s being honest, I’ve extrapolated this out and I won’t have to for a few years since I got food and stuff, but I’m literally looking at my neighbors now going, I’m ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up. You know what, I’m ready. My daughters aren’t starving to death. I’ll eat my neighbor’s. See, my super power is being honest I’ll eat your ass. The point is, is have you thought about that yet? Because I’m somebody that thought I could fix this and I’m starting to think about having to eat my neighbors. You think I like sizing up my neighbor how I’m gonna haul him up by a chain and chop his ass up? I’ll do it. My children aren’t going hungry. I will eat your ass. [laughter]
Erin Ryan: A good dad will show up to other kids’ band concerts. A great dad will eat ass. Jones’ defense in his custody trial was that he was just pretending to be a psycho. For work. His lawyer said that he is a performance artist, and the man America watched screaming about false flags and tactical dick pills was just a character, like the Joker from Batman. This was complicated by the fact that after his lawyer made that claim, Alex Jones appeared on Infowars to clarify that, quote, “we’re the most bonafide, hardcore, real McCoy thing there is.” But then in court, shortly thereafter, he was like, nah, I’m definitely a performance artist.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Black Mirror meets Court TV.
Erin Ryan: Eventually a jury agreed to award primary custody of the children to his ex-wife, thus making Alex Jones the second most divorced man in America, after Jeff Bezos.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Nobody will ever act more divorced than Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, Jones got remarried to a woman named Erika Wulff. The two had a child together, but alas, this love wasn’t to last either. By September, 2024, the couple had mutual restraining orders against each other. In May, 2025, Jones filed for divorce.
Erin Ryan: In 2022, Jones’ legal team accidentally leaked texts to opposing counsel during a defamation lawsuit. Don’t worry, we’re getting there folks. We’re getting there. The text revealed that Jones had a small spy ring to keep tabs on people close to him, including his future ex-wife, Erika.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Girl, I’d say I feel sorry for you, but you had to know what you were getting into when you married Alex Jones in the year of our Lord 2017. What were you thinking?
Erin Ryan: Great question. We probably would not have President Trump or President Trump 2: Sundown Across America without the assistance of Alex Jones. For one thing, just as Alex Jones’ ideas are mostly John Birch Society sloppy seconds, so too are Donald Trump’s wildest claims microwaved Alex Jones’ bullshit.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: During the 2016 campaign, Trump said a lot of things that would probably sound familiar to Infowars fans. Stuff like that fabricated story about Muslims celebrating on 9/11, the one where Hillary Clinton was facing serious secret health issues, and weird disinformation about the drought in California. When Trump was elected, he called Jones personally to thank him for mobilizing the previously underestimated scary uncle vote.
Erin Ryan: On the eve of Trump’s election in 2016, Alex Jones was experiencing a dysregulated kaleidoscope of emotions, from despairing to triumphant to pensive. Some in his inner circle say that he was actually a little bummed that Trump had won. I can understand why he’d be a little freaked out about Hillary not winning, as that would mean he’d have to construct an elaborate excuse for how an anti-establishment skeptic can reconcile being the pocket gerbil of a United States president. That’s a lot of mental gymnastics for a man in such bad shape.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones’ new angle was Qanon-adjacent. Trump was a brave patriot who was being set up to fail by the deep state globalists embedded in every cranny of the American government who wanted Trump to fail. As an amplifier of the Pizzagate theory, Jones stoked baseless rumors that Hillary Clinton and high-ranking members of the Democratic Party were running a pedophile ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in the D.C. Area.
Erin Ryan: In December 2016, a man named Edgar Madsison Welch armed himself with a rifle and set off to Comet Ping Pong to investigate the theory and quote, “rescue the kids” that Jones and the other conspiracy theorists had said were being molested by Hillary Clinton inside. Thankfully, nobody was hurt physically. Jones apologized to the owner of the restaurant, removed all Pizzagate-related content from the Infowars website, and retracted his previous statements accusing a small business owner of hosting a child sexual abuse ring. Apparently in a rare encounter with bare-bones decency.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But just as a zebra can’t change its stripes, Alex Jones can’t not be a total piece of shit.
Erin Ryan: The Comet Ping Pong incident was far from the first time that an Alex Jones fan took a gun somewhere they shouldn’t. There’s a long list of Jones-inspired nutjobs who have been goaded into causing mayhem by Jones’ broadcasts. Among them is a 22-year-old loser named Jared Loughner who in 2011 opened fire in a crowd in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords so seriously that it took years for her to learn to walk and speak again. Loughner had been a big, big fan of Jones’ 9/11 film Loose Change.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones dismissed his role in Loughner’s actions by alleging that the murderer had been abducted and brainwashed by the US government. The whole thing was a mind control operation. Okay, really? Like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic was great for Alex Jones.
Erin Ryan: Of course, Jones was a champion of the belief that COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab, but he gave it a little extra Infowar zing. He claimed that deep state actors within the US government had aided the evil Chinese scientists. He predictably reacted to public officials asking that people wear masks with the same measured civility as a horny frat boy on the verge of whiskey dick being asked to wear a condom.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yuck.
Erin Ryan: And of course he was on
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And team vaccines make you sick. So COVID was a scary disease made by the globalists and Chinese, but also taking steps to prevent it was dumb and also the vaccine was bad, disease bad, preventing disease silly, cure also bad.
Erin Ryan: Alyssa, you’re misreading the situation. By misreading, I mean thinking about it at all. His stances on COVID do not make sense in tandem. But let me just explain it in Alex Jones’ parlance. Alex Jones took COVID-19 very seriously. He was a big fan of treating the illness with ivermectin, a drug used by veterinarians to prevent heartworm and treat other parasites in large animals, and also to treat certain parasites in humans.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But Erin, COVID- 19 isn’t caused by lice or worms.
Erin Ryan: Okay, Debbie Deep State. So maybe using a livestock dewormer to treat a viral infection isn’t your thing. Fine, Alex Jones had other options for you too. Like a colloidal silver-containing product called Super Blue Toothpaste that Jones claimed kill the whole SARS-Corona family at point-blank range, a completely unsubstantiated assertion with no scientific evidence to support it. The FDA issued a cease and desist over that one.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I’ll just stick with bleach, thanks.
Erin Ryan: As far-right extremists have gained more important positions in the American government, Jones’ cozy ties with domestic terrorist groups are barely concealed. Jones has been a member of the Proud Boys himself, but that hasn’t stopped him from filling a sort of drunken stepdad role for them. He has hosted members of the group on his show, including Enrique Tarrio, who by the way turned out to be an FBI informant. We don’t talk about that enough.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: We need to get back to that.
Erin Ryan: Yeah.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones was a big supporter of the Stop the Steal movement, which was a mass delusion of MAGA freaks who believed that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election and larped revolution so hard at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th that five people died. Jones was frequent speaker at the Stop The Steal-related events, including on the night before the riot at the Capitol, and was seen marching toward the Capitol with a bullhorn on the day itself. It’s also been reported that Jones cozied up to Julie Fancelli, the 72-year-old heiress to the public’s grocery store chain, and convinced her to donate $650,000 to organizations gathering supporters in D.C. tor the rally-turned-riot. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least $200,000 of that money was deposited into accounts linked to businesses owned by Alex Jones.
Erin Ryan: Security for Jones at these events was provided at least in part by a far-right militia group called the Oath Keepers. You might know the Oat Keepers by their leader Stuart Rhodes, the balding guy in the dumb looking eye patch who looks like he smells like unwiped ass.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Eventually, Jones was called to testify before the January 6th Committee in Congress, where he pleaded the 5th more than 100 times.
Erin Ryan: The Trump era has required the ever-swelling Alex Jones to be a bit more limber with his tall tales of government treachery. Take the Epstein files for example.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This whole Epstein file thing must be so bittersweet for Alex. He’s got so many things he loves to scream about. Powerful child molesters, cover-ups, wealthy people who believe that they’re above reproach. For years before Trump’s second term, Jones insisted that Epstein was affiliated with foreign intelligence and that powerful people in the US government were protecting him. But Jones can’t really hammer on it the way he used to because his guy is the president and his guy’s on the list.
Erin Ryan: Back in July when the Justice Department released its memo proclaiming that there was no Epstein client list and there was no public interest in releasing more information about the prolific sex traffickers’ crimes, Jones tried to rationalize it by expressing his disappointment, but by filling in the blanks that actually Trump had no choice but to keep the contents of the file secret.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wait, why?
Erin Ryan: Well, Alyssa, it’s because… The Epstein file contents are currently being used to blackmail members of the deep state within the government.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Uh huh.
Erin Ryan: Into obeying President Trump. And if Trump were to release the files, then their ability to black mail the deep-state operatives into obedience to the MAGA agenda would evaporate.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Well, of course, that makes perfect sense.
Erin Ryan: You know, for a guy who’s been claiming since the 1990s that he’s such a dangerous truth teller that the government is probably out to silence him by killing him. Alex Jones is awfully loud and alive. It’s almost like he’s full of shit. And what he has to say is not and never has been threatening to the powerful in any real way. Which brings us to the grimmest, sickest part of the story of Alex Jones, his psychotic fixation on hurting families of children killed in school shootings, and the satisfying, catastrophic reckoning that has been for the last several years constantly breathing down his neck. Now, we’ve already discussed how Alex Jones yells false flag, like the most obnoxious 25-year-old guy at Barney’s Beanery yells, my wife. He’s especially fond of declaring mass shootings false flags, meant to provide an excuse for the government to take all the guns away. That’s probably because it’s easier to claim that school shootings aren’t real than it is to just admit that he thinks his gun ownership is worth more than the lives of other people’s children.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And he’s antagonized mass shooting victims and grieving families in the past. In 2013, he showed up to a Moms Demand Action event for kids at a taco restaurant in San Antonio and got into a fight with one of the parents of a girl killed in the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In December of 2012, a gunman killed 26 people in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 20 of them children under 7 years old. Erin, I spoke to the FBI in Newtown hours after the event. I was told gruesome things I will never forget and would never repeat. I was in New Town about 36 hours after the massacre. President Obama wanted to be present, bear witness to what had happened and try to help heal the community. I had never seen Secret Service agents cry until that day. There is an incredibly heartbreaking photo of Obama posing with the little siblings of victims, joyful at the idea of meeting the president and still very much unaware of what had happened to their brothers and sisters. It’s been 13 years and I cry about that trip every year on the anniversary.
Erin Ryan: Alex Jones, soulless fuck that he is, saw this as a business opportunity. In the aftermath of the shooting, he first claimed that the attack was a [both speaking] false flag. But by 2014, he pivoted, alleging that actually there were no dead kids at all. Nobody was dead. The kids, fake. The parents, paid actors, pretending to grieve the children that weren’t real.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2015, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on Alex Jones’ program promising that he wouldn’t let Jones down. The daughter of the Sandy Hook principal wrote an open letter to Trump in response to the appearance urging the GOP presidential nominee to disavow Jones’ awful statements about her dead mother and all those dead kids. After he was sworn in as president, members of Newtown’s school board wrote Trump a letter asking him to recognize the deaths of the sandy hook victims. Ever the class act, Trump didn’t respond.
Erin Ryan: Meanwhile Jones was running a lucrative and relentless harassment campaign against the families of the slain children, telling his listeners to call the parents and ask them how their children died. Some parents received death threats after their home addresses were doxed.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones platformed another conspiracy nut named Wolfgang Halbig, an ex-Florida school official whose Jones featured on Infowars. Halbig demanded public records on the dead children and became so obsessed with proving that Sandy Hook was fake that he stalked and harassed some of their families.
Erin Ryan: Another Alex Jones fan named Andrew David Truelove stole memorial signs dedicated to Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two six-year-old children who died at Sandy Hook. After he stole the signs he called the children’s parents to taunt them. He ended up getting thrown in jail for a year.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The person who probably should be rotting in jail is Alex Jones, but his fame and wealth have shielded him from any consequences of his actions until 2018.
Erin Ryan: That’s when the chickens, as they say, came home to roost for Jones. On April 16, 2018, oddly and satisfyingly, almost 25 years to the day after the Branch Davidian raid that kicked off Jones’ career in conspiracy, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis had been killed at Sandy Hook, filed a defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones and his associated media businesses in Travis County, Texas. That same day, Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa also filed suit. Pozner had been forced to move several times in order to escape the constant harassment from Infowars fans.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jones and his gaggle of legal crayon eaters slow-walked the case and in late 2019 were fined over $126,000 for contempt of court. Their offense? They straight up didn’t produce witnesses or comply with discovery in the defamation cases they were facing.
Erin Ryan: Come on Alex, this isn’t like drinking and driving in Texas. Discovery isn’t optional. Jones kept getting handed L’s in court, many of which were of his own making. His legal team’s strategy seemed to be to try over and over again to just get the lawsuits dropped. They also refused to comply with most of what the court asked of them. This complete lack of compliance with judicial orders resulted in what’s known as a default judgment, which ended up ordering Jones to pay out the entire amount of damages claimed in the two lawsuits.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But a jury would determine an additional award from Jones and his companies to the four Texas plaintiffs. Jones continued to not take the trial seriously. Like a complete pussy, he skipped court on the day that Neil Heslin testified. Where was he, you might ask? He was making an episode of Infowars, wherein he insulted the grieving father who was currently testifying against him in court. Hours later, he showed up to testify on his own behalf, he was the only person who did, and admitted that he thought Sandy Hook was actually real.
Erin Ryan: Through it all, Jones kept insisting that he’d done everything the court had asked of him and whined that he was being railroaded. And the attorneys for the families kept dog-walking him, like in this Hall of Fame moment when apposing counsel revealed to Alex that they’d gained access to all of the materials he lied about providing to them.
[clip of lawyer]: 12 days ago, your attorney’s messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years, and when informed, did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way, and as of two days ago it fell free and clear into my possession, and that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have to text messages about Sandy Hook. Did you know that?
[clip of Alex Jones]: I told you the truth, this is your Perry Mason moment, I gave them my phone and then—
[clip of lawyer]: Mr. Jones, you need to answer the question.
[clip of Alex Jones]: No, I don’t know what’s happened, but I mean, I told you, I gave him a follow-up.
[clip of lawyer]: Mr. Jones, in discovery, you were asked, do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone, and you said no, correct? You said that under oath, didn’t you?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Everybody was mistaken. I was mistaken, but you’ve got the messages right there.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s like, I mean, he tries to pass it off. He’s like I mean if I said made a mistake, I made a mistake. It’s called perjury, my brother.
Erin Ryan: It’s perjury.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: So while Alex Jones is annoying the ever loving fuck out of that poor judge in Texas, on June 26, 2018, seven families of Sandy Hook victims and one FBI agent involved in the investigation filed a lawsuit of their own against Jones and his associated media businesses in Connecticut. In contrast to the aspartame contrition he showed during the Texas Trial. Jones was markedly more combative during the Connecticut trial.
[clip of lawyer]: Robert Parker’s sitting right here. He’s real, isn’t he?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Yes.
[clip of lawyer]: And for years, you put a target on his back, didn’t you? [overlapping speak] You put a target on his back, just like you did every single parent and loved one sitting here [overlapping speak].
[clip of Alex Jones]: No, I didn’t. These are real people. You know what Mr. Jones?
[clip of Alex Jones]: Just like all the Iraqis, but you liberals kill and love. It’s just, you’re unbelievable. You switch on emotions on and off when you want. You’re just ambulance chasing.
[clip of lawyer]: You have families in this courtroom here that lost children, sisters.
[clip of Alex Jones]: This is a struggle session, are we in China? I’ve already said I’m sorry hundreds of times, and I’m done saying I’m sorry. I didn’t regenerate this, I wasn’t the first person to say it. American gun owners didn’t like being blamed for this, as the left did, so we rejected it mentally and said it must not be true. But I legitimately thought it might have been staged, and I stand by that and I don’t apologize for it.
[clip of lawyer]: And don’t apologize, Mr. Jones. Please don’t apologize.
[clip of Alex Jones]: I’ve already apologized to the parents over and over again. I don’t apologize to you. I don’t apologize to you.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Those poor people.
Erin Ryan: Those poor people, you know, footage of him in a courtroom really shows that when he is not in control of the microphone, he’s a complete fucking pussy. He cannot handle any pushback whatsoever. He can not handle anything that isn’t just him monologuing. We’ll get more into the trials in a second, but let’s go back to 2018. 2018 was not a great year for Alex Jones as social media sites started growing wary of his shtick and began deplatforming him. It started with YouTube in February after Jones accused Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg of being a crisis actor.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He really doesn’t have any original ideas, does he? The drip, drip, drip accelerated into the summer as YouTube and Facebook started selectively removing Jones’ content. But the dam broke on August 6th, 2018, when Facebook, YouTube, Apple, and Pinterest removed all of Alex Jones’ contents. Twitter and Periscope followed.
Erin Ryan: I wanna know who was like adding Alex Jones to their Pinterest.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Pinterest, same.
Erin Ryan: Of course we all know what happened when Elon Musk emerged from his K-hole for long enough to reinstate Jones on Twitter after he acquired the social media site. But Jones remains banned from most social media, including Pinterest, which really upset him, as this neuters his ability to find new audiences. But back to the lawsuits. Alex Jones continued acting like a cancer on humanity at every turn. It’s like a compulsion for him to be a piece of shit. When one of the plaintiffs in the Connecticut case died in an apparent suicide in March 2019. Johns took to Infowars and suggested that the death was a [both speaking] false flag.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Way to make the death of a grieving father about you, Alex. On July 25, 2022, the jury trialed to determine how much Jones owed two of the Sandy Hook families began in Texas.
Erin Ryan: In August 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages in the Texas lawsuits. And in October, the Connecticut judge ruled that Jones owed those families a monocle-popping $965 million in damages to be shared by the 15 plaintiffs.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He’s going to have to sell a lot of male virility supplements.
Erin Ryan: Of course, Alex Jones handled it in the most classless way possible. He didn’t attend court on the day of the verdict, instead live broadcasting himself reacting asking incredulously, do these people think they’re getting any money?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And then he asked his viewers to send him money, which probably didn’t help what happened next, when the judge further awarded the plaintiffs $473 million in punitive damages, which brought the total Alex Jones owed Sandy Hook families to a neck-vein-popping $1.4 billion.
Erin Ryan: Alex Jones had one more Koopa shell to throw on the Mario Kart track that was his wasted life. He declared bankruptcy in late 2022 in a transparent attempt to avoid having to pay the Sandy Hook families anything. But that only slowed things down for so long. In 2023, a bankruptcy judge was like, fuck that, and ruled that liquidating his business and starting fresh would not free him of the $1.4 billion of debt that he owed the families. Every penny that Alex Jones’s bloated carcass earns. For the rest of his life is owed to the grieving families he tormented. Still, Jones’s legal battles continue as Sandy Hook families attempt to chase down the money that Jones was allegedly moving around to avoid being seized by the feds. In October of 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear Alex Jones’ appeal. For dessert, please enjoy this montage of Alex Jones freaking out.
[clip of Alex Jones]: We just offer our children up to the system with the fluoride in the water and the GMO hurting them and we let fat perverts grab them at the airport to train them for the pedophile government. I just want to stop these people. I’m not trying to be dramatic here, but it’s been a hard fight. You think I’m here to be shit on? Do I look like a fucking toilet to you? This is the dark Alex Jones. There’s no more filter. It’s gone. And anybody fucks with me is gonna get the full truth and nothing but it, so help me God. They’re like, you know, if you just turn against Trump, things will be better. But he was doing good. And that’s what makes it so bad. He’d have been a piece of crap from the beginning, would be so bad, but we made so many sacrifices. God almighty!
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How has he not had a stroke?
Erin Ryan: See, this is why men shouldn’t be in charge. No emotional control. Even though Alex Jones is a huge piece of shit and is past the height of his popularity, the damage he’s done can’t be overstated. Not only has he directly influenced people to commit violence and shown unimaginable cruelty to grieving families in pursuit of eyeballs on his grifty ad reads, he’s provided a plausible scapegoat for other members of the media who don’t go to the extremes that Jones goes, but nonetheless exploit the same fears. In the same way that an office sex pest can minimize the harm they do by pointing out that they’re not Harvey Weinstein, so too can Laura Ingraham look like an upstanding journalist compared to the dirtbag standards set by Jones. And he’s had imitators who have also been dangerous. Take Glenn Beck, or as I like to say, caffeine-free diet Alex Jones. Would half of the slack-jawed, gym-idiot-manosphere podcast world exist without Jones? Could MAHA Moms exist without Jones? Hard to say, but… You know what? He’s somebody who does not make the world a better place. Alyssa, how do you rate Alex Jones on our Matrix of F*cking Guys?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Alex Jones is like an actual he’s like top 1% F*cking Guy. Like he’s maybe the F*ckiest Guy of all time I’m gonna say scheming sociopath and true-believing zealot. interesting I think that he’s
Erin Ryan: interesting I think that he’s evolved in his life.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How?
Erin Ryan: And he’s a really good example of how money and power and attention in the like.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay.
Erin Ryan: When given to a person who is like very emotionally unwell can change them. I think that he was a true believing zealot when he was young.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay.
Erin Ryan: I think he was true believing Zealot and now he’s just a total opportunist.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Opportunist. I get that too.
Erin Ryan: Because he’s so in the pocket of power right now, he has to have changed his tune because if he really was just across the board skeptical. Of power, he would be screaming and crying about what ICE is doing, rightfully so. But he’s not, he’s a whore. He’s a total—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You’re right. You know, you’re right, I can come around on that.
Erin Ryan: Do I think he’s dumb? Yes, I think-.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: 100%.
Erin Ryan: He’s a real fucking moron. That’s my view on Alex Jones.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Alright, well that wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you’ve heard, hit subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future F*cking Guy we should spotlight.
Erin Ryan: This episode was written by me with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. Mia Kelman is our video editor. All the rest of our credits, as well as links to our sources, like the Knowledge Fight podcast and Rob Kuznia’s CNN profile of Jones, can be found in our show notes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Take care, be well, don’t choke yourself out for fun.
Erin Ryan: And fuck that guy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Fuck that guy.
