The Man No One Loved Enough to Restrain

Alex Emerick Jones was born in Latvia in 1957. His mother was the owner of ten emaciated pigs and his father was unknown. When he was 12 years old, he hitchhiked to Rotterdam where he stowed away on a cargo ship bound for New York. Landing in America, he was beaten severely by a crass Stevedore named Ulf, but Alex was not deterred. He traveled by foot into Canada, eventually finding himself in Cornwall, Ontario, where he threw a loaf of brown bread across the St. Lawrence river, all the way to Brasher Iron Works, where it struck and defeated the Great Satan.

Shit, that’s not right.


Alex Jones was born in 1974 in Dallas, Texas, where he sprouted into a barrel chested teen, played high school football, was hit in the head repeatedly, and eventually became the weird freak we all know today.

Jones was fired from his first job in radio because he refused to broaden his content beyond paranoid screeching. The manager of KJFK in Austin, TX stated the content of Jones’ program made it difficult to sell advertising on the station. Undeterred, Alex installed an ISDN line in his house, set up his microphone, and launched Infowars with a three hour New Year’s Eve broadcast during which he reported on military convoys rolling into Austin, nuclear power plants melting down, and all of civilization collapsing.

None of which was true. Most of Jones’ tirade centered around a power plant in Pennsylvania taking a single reactor offline, briefly, due to a failed insulator. Being wrong has never stopped Alex Jones.

In 2000 he snuck into Bohemian Grove with a cameraman, filmed a group of aging kooks burning an effigy of their worries, and tried to pass it off as a Satanic ritual. On 9/11/2001, he said there was a “98 percent chance this was a government orchestrated controlled bombing” as the World Trade Center burned and the death toll rose. Over the following fifteen years, Alex Jones fanned the flames of every ridiculous conspiracy theory out there and even invented a few of his own, including the now infamous “gay frogs” assertion.

In 2012, he puffed out his barrel chest and declared the grieving families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims were “crisis actors” and the massacre of children had been staged to force gun control legislation. By the time those families sued him for defamation in 2018, Alex Jones had spent two years throwing himself wholly behind Donald Trump while Infowars was making millions every year selling ad space, MRE buckets, and snake oil supplements to its insufferable audience.

Being wrong never stopped Alex Jones, until it did.

He chose every step of his path on purpose. Alex Jones moved with deliberate conviction through every unfounded conspiracy, every shrieking, shirt-ripping broadcast, and every meme-worthy tantrum. However, knowing more about him outside the broadcast provides insight a social media doom-scroller may not have.

Alex Jones played high school football in Texas in the early 1990s, decades before the NFL acknowledged the long term effects of being struck repeatedly in the head. Joe Rogan has casually stated Jones suffered traumatic brain injuries, plural, but there’s not a lot out there to substantiate that claim apart from behavior, which is substantial.

He is the personification of paranoid ideation. He built a career on it. Anyone who has watched an Infowars broadcast has seen his emotional volatility manifest as screaming, yelling, rending his clothing, issuing threats, and a general lack of self control. The grandiosity of statements like “I am not a businessman, I am a revolutionary” speaks for itself. Each of these things alone is a symptom of a TBI, and all of them combined are damning.

On March 10th 2020 in Austin, Texas, Jones was arrested for driving while intoxicated. Initially, the police were responding to a domestic disturbance involving him and his wife. He claimed he was driving to get away from her. He failed every field sobriety test they gave him. Afterwards, addressing the situation, Alex said “I have to take depressants like alcohol to suppress how empowered I am, because I’m into freedom.”

Traumatic brain injury and alcoholism are not a combination that typically produces successful humans, though Alex Jones defied those odds for about 20 years and gave the world the textbook example of what that combination yields; amplified paranoia, grandiosity, no self control, and volatility.

He was allowed to become all of these things, unchecked. Until the moment he was forced by his lawyers to acknowledge that Sandy Hook was not a hoax, the conspiracy media personality that is Alex Jones grew, festered, and spread without intervention. No parent, sibling, spouse, or friend ever stepped in to be the voice of reason. No one loved him enough to restrain him.

Then he lost everything to The Onion.

And he deserves it. Fuck him.