But as Jones’s false claims and rants launched him into the nationwide political dialogue, his ascent has arguably been solidified, because of Donald Trump and Joe Rogan embracing Jones and endorsing his concepts to on-line audiences of thousands and thousands of individuals in latest years.
Jones’s 2015 interview with Trump provided a window into a few of the future president’s speaking factors at his rallies.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump instructed Jones on the time.
Jones occurring “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020 allowed him to push false claims about coronavirus vaccination on Spotify, the place he had been banned. A clip shared extensively on Twitter this week reveals how Rogan, whose present has an estimated viewers of 11 million per episode, has beforehand defended Jones as “hilarious” and having leisure worth.
“What is he doing that’s so awful?” Rogan requested. “It’s entertaining!”
Representatives for Trump and Rogan didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark early Friday.
The determination from an Austin jury on Thursday implies that Jones may pay considerably lower than the $150 million sought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the mother and father of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, for remarks after the 2012 bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 individuals, 20 of them younger kids, useless. It stays to be seen how a lot Jones, 48, is perhaps ordered to pay in punitive damages. The jury is anticipated to return Friday to weigh that quantity — a sum that may very well be significantly greater.
Shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting, Jones, who has previously promoted conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 attacks, falsely claimed that “no one died” at the school and that the attack was “staged” and “manufactured” by gun-control advocates. The remarks not only outraged grieving parents but also led to death threats and abuse from strangers. After Heslin told the jury this week that the false claims had made his life a “living hell,” Jones conceded in court to the family that the shooting was “100 percent real.”
“Neil and Scarlett are thrilled with the result and look forward to putting Mr. Jones’s money to good use,” Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “With punitive damages still to be decided and multiple additional defamation lawsuits pending, it is clear that Mr. Jones’s time on the American stage is finally coming to an end.”
His presence on the national stage was elevated when Trump, who became the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, agreed to be interviewed on Infowars. Trump and Jones said the December 2015 interview was arranged by Trump confidant Roger Stone — years later Jones and Stone would be subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I will not let you down,” Trump mentioned to the Infowars founder.
Jones has acknowledged the impression he seemed to have on Trump, taking credit for introducing the then-candidate to the idea that media members were his “enemy.”
“It is surreal to talk about issues here on-air, and then, word-for-word, hear Trump say it two days later,” Jones told his audience at the time.
The connection between Trump and Jones was documented in “United States of Conspiracy,” a 2020 special from PBS’s “Frontline.” One of the lies Jones spread on his show was that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama founded the Islamic State. Trump repeated Jones’s false claim about Clinton and Obama at one of the Republican candidate’s rallies before the 2016 presidential election, according to PBS. Trump repeated, during an interview with Fox News, another of Jones’s lies: that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Former Infowars staffers told “Frontline” how Trump seemingly using Jones’s false claims as his own was “a super power trip for Alex that was irresistible.”
“Someone in the mainstream — Trump — using the words that Jones had been using for decades, I think that emboldened Jones, and it changed him as a personality,” said Josh Owens, a former video editor at Infowars.
The support from Trump elevated Jones in the national conversation, as when Fox News host Tucker Carlson hailed Jones as “one of the most popular journalists on the right.” Joe Walsh, the former GOP congressman from Illinois who has since become a vocal critic of Trump and his allies in the Republican Party, noted on Twitter this week how “there’s really no difference between Alex Jones and Donald Trump. None.”
But the raised profile also cost Jones. In 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify were among the platforms to ban all content from Jones and Infowars for violating their hate-speech guidelines. After Roku dropped Infowars in 2019, Jones shared a cryptic post to his Instagram account of a tweet from Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer, which featured an artistic banner of Jones’s face looking enraged.
“Strike me down now and I only become more powerful,” Shroyer wrote.
In the podcasting world, Rogan is one of its premier personalities. Rogan, a lightning rod for controversy who has a huge following, came to an agreement with Spotify in 2020 for a reported $100 million for his podcast library.
So when Rogan welcomed Jones on his present in October 2020, the Infowars host listed a series of falsehoods surrounding coronavirus safety measures such as vaccination and masking, climate science and the polio vaccine. During the course of the three-hour appearance, Rogan also referenced Jones’s lies surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting.
“We all know that you’ve [messed] some things up, right?” Rogan said to Jones in 2020, specifically mentioning Sandy Hook. “But you’ve gotten so many things right. This is why I keep talking to you about these things, and that’s why I defend you and why I think it’s … dangerous to censor you.”
In response to the backlash that followed, Rogan defended having Jones on his show. Rogan said on Instagram that he fact-checked “every single crazy thing he said” and that “all of them were verified.”
“I knew people were going to criticize the content of the podcast without even listening and I was right,” Rogan wrote. “He said a lot of crazy, but accurate things, and that’s what I’ve been saying about him for years.”
Even though Spotify banned Jones and Infowars from its platforms, company executives also defended the booking, writing in an internal email how “it’s important to have diverse voices and points of view on our platform,” according to BuzzFeed News. Rogan found himself under fire at the beginning of 2022 for controversies surrounding coronavirus misinformation and the many previous instances in which the host used the n-word.
A spokesperson for Spotify didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Rogan’s supporters have additionally taken a vested curiosity in Jones. On Reddit, users on the subreddit dedicated to Rogan have flooded the forum with posts about Jones and clips from the defamation damages trial. While some on Reddit are sick of reading about the one-time Rogan guest, others can’t get enough.
“Alex Jones spewing FACTS!” one supporter wrote.