Facebook, YouTube, Spotify stand united against lunatic

A man facing several lawsuits for defamation and harassment for spewing hateful rhetoric and the most disgusting conspiracy theories against the families of children killed while at school has lost a little of sizable online kingdom.

The Infowars empire of Alex Jones is cracking just a little. YouTube removed four episodes of Infowars from its platform and suspended it from live-streaming for 90 days. Facebook suspended Jones’ personal account for 30 days and considered permanently banning pages on which Jones has his poisonous fingerprints and removed four videos. The content was removed for violating each platform’s policy on graphic content and hate speech.

Spotify was late to the game, waiting until several days after YouTube and Facebook took action to announce that it, too, would be removing some of Jones’ podcast episodes. How many were removed is unclear, and there appears to be several thousand hours’ worth of his soul-killing conspiracy theory nonsense out there for anyone to find. Stitcher, too, followed suit.

Does that name sound familiar, by the way? Can’t quite place it?

Alex Jones is the gutless, soulless cretin who suggested the children killed in cold blood while they attended Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, never existed; that their parents were just actors, all part of a government conspiracy to increase gun control.

This chinless “man” has been spewing his reprehensible garbage for years, rushing out with hyperbolic, inflammatory language within hours of several major mass shootings in the United States, in the process incorrectly identifying the person responsible for the Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, earlier this year, questioning whether the Las Vegas shooting last fall was, again, all a big show that didn’t actually really happen but was the fabrication of “crisis actors” – a favourite term of this particular variety of pond scum – to once again try and drum up support for stricter gun control measures.

But it’s the fear and unending pain he’s caused the Sandy Hook families that is particularly horrendous.
Two parents who lost their six-year-old son have had to move seven times in the past few years because listeners of Jones’ podcast and viewers of Infowars videos have tracked them down and made death threats against them.

Can you imagine?! They lost their child while their son was in school, playing with other little kids, a grief no one should have to live with, and they’ve been continually harassed by nutjobs without a single shred of humanity or decency and zero grasp of reality, who believe these grieving parents are ACTING. That their child, their adorable and beloved son, never existed. It’s a claim so galling it should be unthinka

ble, and yet… Jones has been leading the charge since shortly after the Newtown shooting happened, saying the whole thing was faked by the Obama administration.

 

Real consequences for trafficking in hoaxes and lies

In 2017, a Florida woman named Lucy Richards was sentenced to five months in prison for making death threats against one of the Newton families. She admitted to sending a message that read, “LOOK BEHIND YOU IT IS DEATH.” She previously left a message saying “death is coming to you real soon.”  Part of her sentence including home confinement for five months and three years of probation, and she must maintain a daily log of every single bit of data she reads online and where she got it.

Unsurprisingly, Jones has not commented on the actions of YouTube, Facebook and Spotify.

Jones just keeps getting worse

And just when a decent person might think he cannot possibly sink any lower, he does: Jones is suing those Newtown parents, Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son, Noah, was among 20 children killed, and Neil Heslin, whose son, Lewis, was another victim.

Jones is trying to get their lawsuit dismissed, saying nothing he’s said on his shows on any platform are harmful in any way and that all his actions are protected by the First Amendment. He wants $100,000 in court fees from Pozner and De La Rosa, who were threatened by Richards and many others.

Years after the shooting, which he described as an elaborate hoax, Jones did backtrack a little and admit that it happened, that those poor babies were, in fact, real kids who were killed, but he’s also trying to change the story and say he never said that, despite mountains of evidence and his own voice on tape saying the words.

“Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured,” he said. HE ACTUALLY SAID THESE WORDS. In January 2015, a little more than two years after that December 2012 atrocity. “I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey – so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit.”

New targets

More recently, Jones has very casually made thinly veiled threats against special counsel Robert Mueller, the man responsible for determining whether there was collusion with Russia during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He’s also spoken out against Brennan Gilmore, whose video of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer included the death of Heather Heyer. Gilmore is still getting death threats and accusations that he’s a CIA operative who helped stage the attack.

“A Spotify spokesperson declined to share what episodes were removed or what specific content triggered the company’s action, but the podcast is still available through the service,” Recode reported.

“Unlike Facebook and YouTube, though, which suspend users after they receive a certain number of strikes against their record, Spotify doesn’t have a similar system in place, according to a source. It’s unclear, then, how or if Jones might be suspended or banned from the service altogether.”

Jones, sensing that things were getting dicey for him and his army of hate and ignorance, has been pushing his sycophants to a new app he just launched, where they can get all his mouth-breathing crazy in their clammy little hands directly. It’s also still available on Apple Podcasts and Podbean. In the first month it was available, his app was downloaded 84,000 times and listeners spent more than 500,000 using it.

When he learned of the latest moves against him and his crackpots, Jones said he expected the move. “I was born in censorship. I was born being suppressed,” CBS News reported.

Oh, the poor suppressed millionaire white man who tells people dead children didn’t really exist and were never real. Yeah, let’s all weep for him.

 

UPDATE: As of late August 5, Apple Podcasts is removing both Infowars and Alex Jones’ other podcast from its service, Buzzfeed reports.

Liked it? Take a second to support Amber Healy on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Leave a Comment