Alex Jones and His Pill-Pushing Chiropractor Are Here to Save Your Colon From the Globalists
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A good chunk of both the left and right-wing media worlds spent the past two weeks fixated on the child-custody trial of Alex Jones, the Austin-based conspiracy king and the most recognizable voice of paranoia in the United States. His lawyer argued in court that Jones’s bananas on-air behavior is “playing a character,” calling him a “performance artist” to counter his ex-wife’s contention that he’s unstable, mercurial, and ill-equipped to care for their three children.
Jones, who’s repeatedly called the Sandy Hook shootings a hoax, had asked for privacy on behalf of his family. Jones has also denounced the latest attacks on him by the “presstitute” mainstream media, and insisted—contrary to his lawyer’s argument—that he believes what he’s saying. In the same breath, though, he allowed that sometimes he “plays satire roles” to make a point. In a late-night verdict last Thursday, after more than nine hours of deliberation, a jury granted Jones’s ex-wife joint custody, with the ability to decide where the children will live.
Jones is a one-man suspicion empire, the throbbing, shouting, tomato-red heart at the center of the websites Infowars and Prison Planet. He broadcasts for hours every day, bellowing, growling, raging, and pounding his desk in a feverish outrage at the globalist forces, who are making us sick, weak, and progressively dumber to enslave us. His greatest-hits list is long and well-known, from accusing Hillary Clinton of being a literal demon who smells of sulphur or rotting meat to suggesting that innumerable shootings, acts of violence, and terrorism are false flags staged by the government to justify coming for our guns and our liberty. (He also suspects pharmaceutical companies of using noxious chemicals to create a “homosexual biosphere,” which is not as fun as it sounds.)
Jones’s public fixation with his innards and what threatens them seems to have begun around 2006, when he launched Infowars Life, an offshoot of the Infowars media empire focusing on dietary supplements. By 2013, he’d acquired a trusted friend and advisor in Dr. Edward Group III, a chiropractor who he described as “on board with the liberty movement,” Jones’s term for a particular mixture of anti-government fervor and all-purpose suspicion.
For the past few years, Group has appeared frequently on Jones’s program to talk about supplements, health trends, and the dangers of vaccines, which he has suggested for years are linked to autism (They are not). Questionable medical experts like Dr. Oz and his support for unproven faux-medical treatments, or Dr. Phil and his penchant for casual exploitation of tragedy and mental illness make for good TV no matter your position on the “liberty movement.” But lately, some of our most prominent faux experts are leaping out of the television and into government: Dr. Ben Carson, who has claimed, falsely, that some vaccines are superfluous, is head of Housing and Urban Development, appointed by a president who’s also openly skeptical of vaccines and willing to publicly consider the discredited idea that they cause autism.
The Group/Jones relationship might be the best nexus we have for understanding how conspiracy theorism and and alternative health claims are intertwined. For some conspiracy-minded people, vitamins and supplements are a literal manifestation of a desire to protect oneself from outside influence, corruption, and the taint of the larger world. No one has said it better than Jones himself, in fact, in his passionate 2013 introduction to Group and his works.
“The real revolution here is that they’re targeting our bodies,” he thundered. “So that we’re so poisoned that we can’t even get upset or motivated to resist them. So the revolution starts with our bodies. It starts with getting our kids out of the public schools. It starts with decoupling from the system, not caring what Hollywood and the media say. And that’s happening. Congress has a six percent approval rating. The mainstream media’s dying.”
A spate of profiles of Jones and explainers of Infowars have appeared since the election (the best, by German magazine Der Spiegel, featured Jones suddenly ripping off his shirt to performatively eat meat in front of the reporter). Between April 2015 and April 2016, according to Quantcast data, the site garnered 187.2 million global visits; in the next year, their audience grew by almost 25 percent, to 238.8 million global visits by April 2017. One of their all-time best days appears to have been November 10, 2016, two days after the presidential election.
Jones’s new prominence makes his particular brand of health advice a more pressing concern. If, as Jones claims, he is playing a character when the cameras are on—or at least an exaggerated version of himself— of what value is the medical advice Jones offers on-air? What does it mean about the supplements, pills and treatments that he swears by, recommends to his audience, and sometimes gulps down mid-broadcast?
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