Alex Jones puts gravel in his Listerine and is responsible for leading many to bebe’s first conspiracy theory. Let’s take a look at Alex Jones over the past 5 years according to Google Trends.

JULY 2016

Alex Jones smashed July 2016 and the Republican National Convention. In somewhat calculated fashion he trolled and jackassed his way into a flurry of headlines. Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks were counted among his victims when Alex Jones invaded their show and left them cornered by the drunken uncle.

It’s hard to tell who was baiting who, but legacy media were all happy to take turns on the punching bag while earning nods from their peers for “sounding the alarm“.

“Hillary for prison!” Jones shouted, in a voice that sounds like a car horn being run though a volcano

-Washington Post

Not only was legacy media keeping an eye on him, but it turns out the man who helped Alex Jones film his initial Bohemian Grove breakout tape was still watching from the shadows. Jon Ronson writes about how he had tricked Alex Jones into the Bohemian Grove stunt, and worked his jimmies into an absolute mess over Jones’ rising prominence.

I’ve been following Alex Jones’s career for nearly twenty years, because I am basically his Simon Cowell. Back in 1999 I had the idea, for my book Them: Adventures with Extremists, to try and sneak into the private summer camp Bohemian Grove where members of the ruling elite – Dick Cheney, George Bush, Henry Kissinger, et cetera – were long rumored by conspiracy theorists to undertake a ritual that culminated in a human effigy being thrown into the fiery belly of a giant stone owl.

-Jon Ronson

And then came the moment. It started with a woman on the delegate floor yelling out, “Hillary for prison!” And Pat Smith replied, “That’s right. Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.” Hillary for prison. With those three words Alex Jones – the man who coined the phrase – finally made it onto the stage of the Republican National Convention and right into the heart of mainstream American politics.

-Jon Ronson

An impartial observer might ask why all these media outlets would give away millions of dollars in free advertising. It could also be argued that this coverage was mutually beneficial if seeking a broader audience.

The real headliner, though, was Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host and Infowars founder who arrived with a start, wheeling around with bodyguards while looking for the organizers. Nowhere else to turn, he eventually jumped on stage and bellowed, “Hillary for prison!” Those same words appeared on T-shirts sold by Infowars and, in the days before the airspace over Cleveland was closed, a plane that flew a banner asking for the same.

-CNN

So although Alex Jones was already widely known, July 2016 may have been the moment he graduated to a household name. The frazzling of Cenk Uygur and “Hillary for Prison” banner ensured dozens of heavily trafficked articles were written in his praise and condemnation.

OCTOBER 2016

Media other than Alex Jones often author his spikes in popularity. My all-time favorite person David Brock has been a party to this. Alex Jones got a triple double whammy in October 2016, receiving hits from Media Matters, NYT, Vox, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama over his characterization of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as literal demons from hell. (hot take)

I was reading the other day there is a guy on the radio who apparently — Trump’s on his show frequently — he said me and Hillary are demons… Said we smelled like sulfur. Ain’t that something?

-Barack Obama

This was the point of no return, as mention from both Hillary and Obama in October 2016 made Alex Jones too loud for anyone to ignore. The toothpaste was out of the tube and contained all sorts of weird vitamins & supplements.

NOVEMBER 2016

APRIL 2017

At the time I thought this might hurt him, but then again most wrestling fans know it’s fake. Alex Jones had his custody battle dragged into public spotlight, and walked away with “Performance Art” added to his resume.

It worked for Lady Gaga, so why not give it a shot? The surprise wasn’t that his lawyer would claim Alex Jones played a character, but that it was the juiciest headline they could harvest.

JUNE 2017

Alex Jones got another boost in June 2017 after his appearance on NBC for an interview with Megyn Kelly. At the time, she was fresh off her “Donald Trump Hurt Me” haircut and looking for a soft target to save her waning show. Again, analytics suggest all they did was add fuel to the fire.

In a 17-minute segment — which had generated hours of commentary and a raft of protests before it aired — Ms. Kelly repeatedly challenged Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist, Infowars founder and influential right-wing personality.

-NYT

Oooph… “repeatedly challenged“… Imagine falling so flat not even the New York Times can breathe life into you. They stayed up all night snorting Adderall and that was the absolute best they could muster in a room filled with 100 collective years of Ivy League education.

In a twist that would gets nods from P.T. Barnum himself, Alex Jones released contradictory audio from Kelly’s interview pitch, and an uncut version of the interview proper. This generated a mountain of clicks as media outlets other than NBC got to dunk on both Jones and their competition at the same time.

I’m not looking to portray you as a bogeyman… The craziest thing of all would be if some of the people who have this insane version of you in your heads walk away saying, ‘You know, I see the dad in him. I see the guy who loves those kids and is more complex than I’ve been led to believe.

-Megyn Kelly in audio released by InfoWars

APRIL 2018

It was time to trend again when three parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting sued Alex Jones for defamation. The focus of the lawsuit was his show aired Apr. 22, 2017 called “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed“. During this segment Jones confuses compression artifacts for facts, given his reaction to an interview Ms. De La Rosa did with Anderson Cooper on CNN. A sad day when a simple water filter salesman can’t even upload reaction vids without getting sued.

During that quick head movement, Mr. Cooper’s nose seems to disappear — evidence, Mr. Jones said, that the interview with Ms. De La Rosa was conducted in a studio. In reality, the glitch is known as a compression artifact, a distortion that is common in video encoding.

-NYT, being correct probably

JULY 2018

July 2018 dealt a double blow to Alex Jones when he not only got the boot from Facebook, but weathered YouTube pulling his videos over hate speech and child endangerment.

We remove content that violates our standards as soon as we’re aware of it. In this case, we received reports related to four different videos on the pages that InfoWars and Alex Jones maintain on Facebook. We reviewed the content against our community standards and determined that it violates. All four videos have been removed from Facebook.

-Facebook spokesperson to The Guardian

Things would not get better for Alex as the summer carried on. The benefits of what infamy the media had bestowed upon him was being challenged by the growing limitations of his le crazy conspiracy man designation.

AUGUST 2018

The largest spike in Alex Jones-related Google searches occurred in August 2018, as Apple decided it also wanted money from China stood for sugar, spice and everything nice. They banned Alex Jones and the resulting Facebook/YouTube/Apple trifecta was dirtbag paydirt fit for a media feeding frenzy.

Facebook, Spotify and Google’s YouTube site, which removed some Infowars content last week, followed with stronger measures on Monday. Facebook removed four pages belonging to Mr. Jones, including one with nearly 1.7 million followers as of last month, for violating its policies by “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” Facebook said the violations did not relate to “false news.”

-NYT

The hits would keep coming as Alex Jones was deleted in every way short of a bullet. Mashable seemed extremely pleased with themselves for getting Alex Jones banned from Pintrest, and MailChimp reported their compliance to Media Matters directly. To guarantee his Rolodex was fully invalidated, LinkedIn took a nail-gun to his coffin and removed Alex Jones from their website as well.

It’s hard out there for conspiracy-theory peddling, dietary-supplement hawking, tormentors of grieving parents. But hope shines eternal in the human breast, and for Alex Jones that breast was starting to look a lot like Pinterest. Until Mashable emailed the social-sharing platform, that is.

-Mashable, flexing strangely

SEPTEMBER 2018

Always failing and behind the curve, Twitter caused another round of Alex Jones queries in September 2018 when they followed their silicon siblings in banning him from their service.

This second click wave coming off his numerous bans in the previous months was buoyed by the usual suspects peppering the Twitter-related articles with various other feelsbadman stories.

a review of traffic on Infowars several weeks after the bans shows that the tech companies drastically reduced Mr. Jones’s reach by cutting off his primary distribution channels: YouTube and Facebook.

-NYT, earning their salaries

Alex only trended stronger as all of tech decided he was no longer welcome, PayPal included. Their act of dancing on his grave may have only served to bring more boys to the yard, as Alex Jones remained relevant as ever.

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2019

Alex Jones made a marathon 280-minute appearance on Joe Rogan Experience February 28, 2019. The cascading outrage from bluecheck Twitter ensured that Alex Jones would again accrue significant search volume. The longer and drunker the interview went, the more clear it became Alex Jones showed up hoping to coerce Eddie Bravo (or anyone) into “choking him out” on air for “a hundred million views”. At 1:50:30 he go so far as to wave all liability for said desired suffocation. It was sad.

JUNE 2019

In June 2019 Alex Jones had a murky media presence. Although he was currently being sued by parents of Sandy Hook victims, a separate lawsuit over a book written about Sandy Hook ended up conflated with the Alex Jones suit. A Wisconsin judge issued a summary judgment in favor of a defamation lawsuit against the authors of a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.

Mr. Pozner has sought for years to try to get these conspiracy theorists to understand that his son really was a person and that his son really did die and as a last resort we initiated this defamation case

-Jake Zimmerman, lawyer

This headline got bundled with a concurrent happening in the Alex Jones case, which took an odd turn when there was CP on files sent from Alex Jones to Lawyers of the Sandy Hook families.

Alex couldn’t stop himself from making this worse, when on his June 14, 2019 show he offered a $1 million reward for heads on pikes in retaliation for the CP planted on his servers. Court filings accuse Jones of threatening lawyer Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families, and his law firm. I’m not sure how much “all press is good press” still applied at this point.

AUGUST 2019

Alex Jones Google Trends got a double boost in August 2019, both from an FBI memo regarding conspiracy theorists and YouTube banning him again. Alex Jones is not directly named in the FBI memo, but was mentioned in many articles written about it.

The new and short-lived channel was called “War Room”, and their first video featured host Owen Shroyer reading YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s recent quarterly letter to YouTube creators. Banned for lazy content?

MARCH 2020

Mainstream Meteor found themselves with the puck and an open net when on March 10, 2020 Alex Jones caught a saki-soaked DWI in Texas. His breathalyzer result was 0.079% BAC, below the Texas legal limit for DWI (0.08 percent blood alcohol content). He we was initially pulled over for speeding 45 mph in a 40 mph zone and failed both the “Walk & Turn” and “One Leg Stand” field sobriety tests.

In Texas, a person is legally intoxicated and may be arrested and charged with Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) with a .08 BAC (blood or breath alcohol concentration),” the department says. “However, a person is also intoxicated if impaired due to alcohol or other drugs regardless of BAC.

-Texas Department of Transportation

Alex Jones won another round of undivided attention as hardly a single outlet could resist throwing their tomato. Apparently Addictioncenter.com felt it finally had the perfect segue into defending Hillary Clinton and Robert Mueller on their website about addictions.

Seems to be much a DWI about nothing. See part of his response below, or read the official post here.

BONUS: ALEX JONES 1997 HALLOWEEN SHOW

A reminder of simpler times, with comfy Art Bell overtones.