Worried about the US being led by a tyrant who may destroy the earth? Blame Alex Jones

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/18/worried-about-the-us-being-led-by-a-tyrant-who-may-destroy-the-earth-blame-alex-jones
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American far-right radio host Alex Jones believes that Hillary Clinton is literally a demon – a red monster with a rubber face, an unregistered foreign agent from hell, which is a real place, where Satan, who is real, tortures unbaptised babies with a big fork in between demanding sacrifices of “blood, semen, and breast milk” from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. I am only editorialising a little.

Jones, an ardent Trump booster, has made such claims over and over again on his too-popular-for-comfort radio programme, the Alex Jones Show, as well as on his websites, the best known of which is Infowars.com. He’s called Clinton a “demonic warmonger”, a “damn demon”, and an “abject, psychopathic demon from hell” who attends a “witches’ church” and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped [children]”. If she won the election, Jones warned his followers last year, Clinton would “try to destroy the planet”. He once accused former secretary of state John Kerry of membership in a satanic sex cult, in which devotees have “gay sex hundreds of times in coffins begging for spiritual entities to possess them. That get in coffins hundreds of times in giant pits of faeces and have sex with each other. OK? That’s who’s running things! ... That’s what we’re dealing with, ladies and gentlemen.” Jones thinks the moon landing was faked and the government is putting chemicals in the water to turn people (and frogs) gay.

The current president of the United States of America, Donald J Trump, who has access to nuclear weapons, once appeared on Jones’s radio show, calling the host “amazing” and vowing, “I will not let you down … I think we’ll be speaking a lot.” Earlier this year, Trump pushed one of Jones’s conspiracy theories, claiming that the “dishonest press” is covering up terrorist attacks by Muslims in order to coddle Isis. Name a conspiracy theory, no matter how obscure, and Jones has almost certainly screeched it into a microphone with his signature drunk-leafblower panache. And the president is listening. OK? That’s who’s running things. That’s what we’re dealing with, ladies and gentlemen.
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But a fresh and unexpected conspiracy is gripping the Jones camp this week, and this time the supposed puppetmaster is Jones himself. In the thick of a bitter custody battle between Jones and his ex-wife Kelly (who alleges that Jones is “not a stable person” and “wants J-Lo to get raped”), Jones’s lawyer has made the surprising claim that his client is “playing a character” and “is a performance artist” and therefore can’t be held accountable for his on-air behaviour and ideas, or how they might impact his children.