If you don’t know who Alex Jones is, consider yourself lucky.
Picture a mentally unstable person boiling over in rage and ranting about conspiracy theories on a street corner. That’s Alex Jones, except instead of a street corner, he has his own radio program and video show on the Internets.
Jones is a terrible person. He’s delusional, hateful and says things that anyone with any sense knows are crazy and have no basis in reality. Oh, and Donald Trump loves him. Who says opposites attract?
Jones has a long history of anti-LGBT animosity.
He’s ranted that the Pulse Nightclub murders in Orlando were a government conspiracy and that the gay community brought it on itself and/or was in on it.
He recently called Congressman Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who has been investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, “an archetypal cocksucker” and “a fairy” who is “sucking globalist dick.”
In 2015, Jones said that letting children read “Heather Has Two Mommies” or being respectful of whether a child identifies as a girl or a boy was “space-cult, suicide-cult, exterminism, craziness.” The ultimate plan, Jones said, “is an asexual humanoid.”
He promoted the story that Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel were gay lovers and that Michelle Obama is transgender. “I think it’s all an arranged marriage,” he said last year. “It’s all completely fake and it’s this big sick joke because [Obama is] obsessed with transgender, just like some weird cult or something. I think Michelle Obama is a man. I really do. I really do. I believe it.” Oh, he also believes that Michelle Obama murdered Joan Rivers.
He’s called Lady Gaga a “goddess of Satan” and claimed that Beyoncé, with the CIA’s help, wanted to eat children’s brains.
Did I mention Trump likes this guy?
Anyway, Jones is currently involved in a custody battle with his ex-wife for their three children, ages 14, 12 and 9. According to his ex-wife, Jones broadcasts his show from the home where he lives with the children and she thinks being exposed to this radical extremist rhetoric is bad for the kids.
“He’s not a stable person,” she reportedly told the court according to NBC News. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.”
But hey, at least he’s not reading “Heather Has Two Mommies” to his kids.
Now that the custody of his kids hangs in the balance, Jones, who has basically been a tin-foil-hat salesman and model for years, has changed his tune. He is, according to his lawyer, a “performance artist” who takes “powerful and aggressive and strong and strident positions on controversial issues.”
In other words, he’s like an interpretive dancer, if said dancer used hate speech and lies instead of, say, dance moves.
On April 15, a clip was posted to the Internet of Jones saying that what he did was “satire” and that he wasn’t being literal. “Yeah, I dress up as the Joker and act all crazy and say crazy stuff. That’s called satire,” he said, adding, “I believe everything I’m basically saying.”
The reference to the Joker was an attempt at humor, something Jones is not good at. He is also terrible at satire but very good at believing and spewing complete bullshit. With credentials like that, he could very well become president, or at least get a position in the Trump administration.
D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBT politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.