Analysis | How Alex Jones turned the Parkland shooting into a week-long news cycle about himself
The loyal fans of Infowars grabbed their pitchforks, as their enemies started to make popcorn. On Saturday night, it appeared as though Alex Jones and his empire of conspiracy theories were about to be banned from YouTube for good.
“The Alex Jones channel with billions of views is frozen,” Jones tweeted in an emergency message to his followers. “We have been told it will be deleted tomorrow.” The tweet linked to “Infowars Censored,” a new YouTube channel he created two days before that has amassed 17,000 subscribers.
“Infowars Censored” has the feel of a makeshift bunker, where instead of his studio, Jones broadcasts from his kitchen table, and claims that YouTube is infringing on his speech by banning the videos in which he criticizes student gun control activists who survived a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. “They banned videos where I’m saying they’re not crisis actors, it’s a real shooting, they’ve just been Democratic Party operatives and have been scripted in what they’re saying,” Jones said, clutching two pages of handwritten notes. The video also was shown live on Facebook.
Jones has long questioned the basic facts of mass shootings in the United States, once saying that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was “completely fake with actors.” But now he says that the shooting happened, even though he thinks there were “anomalies.” When reporters bring up his past comments about Sandy Hook, he turns around and accuses the media of slander.
If your first instinct after a tragedy such as the Parkland shooting is to worry about your gun rights, it becomes easier to suspect its victims and survivors. And Jones began preparing his audience to suspect the official story about the massacre in the first moments after it was reported.
[ In the great ‘meme wars,’ Alex Jones doesn’t care if he makes them or is them ]
“It’s as if the media advertises, ‘This is where you go where no one’s armed to shoot you,’ ” Jones said to Republican political operative Roger Stone in one video from the day of the shooting. “And then it’s almost always some crazed leftist or weird Islamicist that’s done it, and the left keeps saying, ‘If you expose us on the memo, there’ll be big massacres blamed on you.’ “
Stone chimed in: “This will be hyped tomorrow. Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer and Ana Navarro will be using this yet again as an excuse to take away our firearms.”
Jones said, “If there is any Islamic connection, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be no coverage of it.”
Then, Stone said, “Alex, we’re praying for the families.”
‘They’re actors! They’re actors!’
In the days after the Florida shooting, Jones started talking more and more about Parkland student David Hogg. Conspiracy theorists had accused Hogg and his activist classmates of being “crisis actors,” or paid actors who pretend to be victims of a tragedy to advocate for gun control.
The loyal fans of Infowars grabbed their pitchforks, as their enemies started to make popcorn. On Saturday night, it appeared as though Alex Jones and his empire of conspiracy theories were about to be banned from YouTube for good.
“The Alex Jones channel with billions of views is frozen,” Jones tweeted in an emergency message to his followers. “We have been told it will be deleted tomorrow.” The tweet linked to “Infowars Censored,” a new YouTube channel he created two days before that has amassed 17,000 subscribers.
“Infowars Censored” has the feel of a makeshift bunker, where instead of his studio, Jones broadcasts from his kitchen table, and claims that YouTube is infringing on his speech by banning the videos in which he criticizes student gun control activists who survived a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. “They banned videos where I’m saying they’re not crisis actors, it’s a real shooting, they’ve just been Democratic Party operatives and have been scripted in what they’re saying,” Jones said, clutching two pages of handwritten notes. The video also was shown live on Facebook.
Jones has long questioned the basic facts of mass shootings in the United States, once saying that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was “completely fake with actors.” But now he says that the shooting happened, even though he thinks there were “anomalies.” When reporters bring up his past comments about Sandy Hook, he turns around and accuses the media of slander.
If your first instinct after a tragedy such as the Parkland shooting is to worry about your gun rights, it becomes easier to suspect its victims and survivors. And Jones began preparing his audience to suspect the official story about the massacre in the first moments after it was reported.
[ In the great ‘meme wars,’ Alex Jones doesn’t care if he makes them or is them ]
“It’s as if the media advertises, ‘This is where you go where no one’s armed to shoot you,’ ” Jones said to Republican political operative Roger Stone in one video from the day of the shooting. “And then it’s almost always some crazed leftist or weird Islamicist that’s done it, and the left keeps saying, ‘If you expose us on the memo, there’ll be big massacres blamed on you.’ “
Stone chimed in: “This will be hyped tomorrow. Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer and Ana Navarro will be using this yet again as an excuse to take away our firearms.”
Jones said, “If there is any Islamic connection, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be no coverage of it.”
Then, Stone said, “Alex, we’re praying for the families.”
‘They’re actors! They’re actors!’
In the days after the Florida shooting, Jones started talking more and more about Parkland student David Hogg. Conspiracy theorists had accused Hogg and his activist classmates of being “crisis actors,” or paid actors who pretend to be victims of a tragedy to advocate for gun control.
