Definitions from Merriam-Webster:
Laughingstock: Noun, an object of ridicule.
Joke: Noun, something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act.
If Alex Jones’ old InfoWars website wasn’t so hateful, deceptive, inane, hurtful, and…, and…, well, you get the picture, it’d have been a laughingstock. Jones was the noxious gasbag who, during the years of InfoWars’ ascension, polluted the airwaves and the internet with preposterous accusations and outright lies. For instance, Pink News in 2018 published a list of “The 11 Craziest Conspiracy Theories InfoWars Pushed about LGBT People.” Here they are:
- Barack Obama is having gay sex with 10 dudes a day
- Schools are turning your kids gay to make them want to have sex with your car
- Violent lesbians are coming to eat your brains
- Drag queens are putting chemicals in the water to recruit your child
- Joan Rivers was murdered for calling Michelle Obama transgender
- Anderson Cooper is an undercover CIA agaent sent to take down Donald Trump
- Lady Gaga is a Nazi stanic goddess and her Super Bowl performance was an eleborate ritual to summon the anitchrist
- The governemtn is putting chemicals in the water and turning frogs gay
- The US is getting ready to nuke the “fairies and pansies” in China
- LGBT people are creating cyborgs to destroy civilization
The eleventh item was just a catchall for Jone’s long history of mentioning, slurring, libeling, and obsessing about LGBTQI people.
Jones thought and opined about LGBTQI people a lot. A lot.
I wonder why. In any case, that’s a matter for him and his shrink.
Jones would go off on every other hot-button issue, too, making crazy shit up, amplifying other conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams, and demonizing anybody who didn’t own a pickup truck that rolled coal.
Alex Jones’ Kind of People.
By 2017, InfoWars was getting more than ten million views/listens/clicks a month. Jones made hundreds of millions of dollars peddling his fuckery. That says more about America than a hundred elementary school US history textbooks ever could. Oh, and guess who dug the hell out of Alex Jones — need I reveal this person now lives on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC?
It all came tumbling down for Jones after the horrifying Sandy Hook massacre. Jones screeched that the shooting and killings were staged, popularizing the term “crisis actors,” and convincing millions of coal rollers that all those grieving parents were in on the scam.
Those parents, doubly traumatized, responded by suing the bejesus out of Jones. They won and Jones was forced into the earthly hell of bankruptcy. Of course, I can only hope and pray there is an afterlife hell, if only to house the likes of Alex Jones for eternity.
Jones’ bankruptcy executors are seeking a purchaser for InfoWars, as a way to maximize financial payouts to the parents who sued him. Lo and behold, one of the potential buyers for the media operation is The Onion.
Yep. That fabulous, indispensable satiric website, one of my go-to reads since the early ’90s. Just this week, The Onion has proffered a plan to license the InfoWars name and infrastructure so it can begin publishing a parody version of it.
I hope the plan is accepted. There’s scads of legal folderol that have to be navigated, sure, but the sooner Jones and his evil creation become punch lines, the better.
You might say it’ll never be appropriate to laugh at such poison. I’ll counter with Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, The Producers. Staged on Broadway just 22 years after Hitler’s Nazi’s were crushed, The Producers brought down the house with ditties like “Springtime for Hitler.”
Don’t be stupid/
Be a smarty.
Come and join/
the Nazi party!
From the Movie, The Producers.
Brilliant! It’s never too soon to reduce the worst among us to laughingstocks.
Alex Jones and his Infowars were never jokes when they were at their height.
They are now.