The obituary for Alex Jones’s Infowars will not blame gay frogs, Bill Gates’s microchips or Robert Francis O’Rourke — instead, the rather less exciting cause of death will surely be Chapter 11.
Infowars filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy this weekend as its founder Jones faces liability in three defamation lawsuits for his ghastly claim that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, in which twenty students and six staff were killed, was a hoax.
In an earlier legal battle — over custody of his kids — Jones’s lawyers argued that on air, he was “playing a character.” “He is a performance artist,” attorney Randall Wilhite told a Texas judge. Unfortunately, Jones the real person is having to cash the checks that Jones the performance artist signed.
Of course, Cockburn can’t condone the host’s grim treatment of the Sandy Hook families. But there’s so much more of the Infowars oeuvre deserving of a wistful look back.
Gay frogs
“I don’t like ’em puttin’ chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay!”
Perhaps the most famous Alex Jones moment, in 2015 the host ranted about a conspiracy theory involving the US government, for reasons that are unclear, chemically modifying water in order to make frogs homosexual.
In a later, equally bizarre appearance, Jones donned a costume and a tutu, appearing as “Geronimo Frost,” a “totally cool gay frog.”
oh my god pic.twitter.com/6aKyGKPMCa
— jordan (@JordanUhl) November 2, 2018
Chasing the haters of Seattle
Another epoch-defining Jones clip shows the host being flipped off by a passerby while taping a segment in Seattle.
Jones chases after the passerby, swearing at him and calling him a “coward.” The moment inspired several spin-off memes, of which Cockburn’s favorite is this:
Accidental trans porn plug
A blink-and-you’ll miss it Infowars highlight came in August 2018, when during a plug for one of the company’s many “health supplements,” Jones briefly flashed a pornographic video he’d been watching on his phone. Cockburn was the first to speak to Marissa Minx, the trans woman featured in the film, who said “I think it’s great he’s watching my work.”
Robert Francis O’Rourke
Later in 2018, Reason editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown was in Texas to cover a joint rally between President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz. She stumbled upon Jones standing in the street, yelling at a turd and addressing it as “Robert Francis O’Rourke,” aka Beto, Cruz’s opponent for one of Texas’s Senate seats.
Literally the first thing I encountered in the vicinity of the Cruz/Trump rally was Alex Jones screaming at a pile of shit pic.twitter.com/lxmPgjAmB5
— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) October 22, 2018
Llama time
Jones welcomed many strange and fantastical guests into the Infowars studio. Chief among them would be this small group of llamas. The host reels off a list of conspiracy theories that the mainstream media has been choosing to ignore, before saying, “Now that I have llamas… now that I have the secret weapon… this is amazing, here you go my sweetsie!”
Gn enjoy Alex Jones with some llamas pic.twitter.com/Os1VLkwJUx
— Finessa Fudges (@FinessaFudges) March 31, 2021
“There’s no fluoride in this,” he tells Poco the llama, who is refusing to take the cookie he is proffering.
The new Infowars mascot
Comedy writer Cole Hersch made an appearance on Infowars in late 2020 to pitch Jones on a new mascot for the site. “His name is Cuck Slayer, and he’s a loud veiny American flag, whose limbs are AR-15s,” Hersch begins, before describing how the mascot would “sneak inside children’s hospitals and go room to room, sucking the vaccines out of newborns like snake venom.” Needless to say, the clip below features explicit language — it’s Alex Jones, after all.
i pitched a mascot to InfoWars pic.twitter.com/sTPC0ffdbL
— cole hersch ⑦ (@ColesTwitt3r) October 9, 2020
