In the course of the last decade or more, as hyperventilation and hyperbole joined forces to pass judgment on everything from elementary education through politics at every level of government to life in these occasionally United States, I would, in rare moments, needle drop on Alex Jones' fever dream, Infowars.
For a long time, all I thought he had was a website, and then, through a former colleague (whom I barely knew when we were stationed in Germany (separate locations)), I found he had a YouTube channel. And as horrified as I was to make that discovery, there are many YouTube channels even more bizarre than Jones'.
Talk about a waste of technology. His stuff was lunatic fringe for the longest time, and somehow (I never understood how) joined at the crazy with QAnon, which (by itself) put the "F" in "WTF." That otherwise sane people, almost all only white men, swallowed his bunkum, confounds me, but never really involved me until he weighed in on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, insisting it was all fake.
I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child, much less having a loudmouth lout insist that none of what you were experiencing was real, that you and your deceased child were crisis actors. Decency should have dictated that Jones stop, but decency is a lost value, and it took a long, arduous legal battle to shut him down, and bankruptcy to shut him up.
Proving God's sense of irony is alive and well, The Onion successfully bid to acquire Infowars' assets (though, thankfully, not its head a$$hole), though there's still some legal fandangoing yet to happen, which is why all that is available right now is this brilliant send-up of the usual tripe Infowars was notorious for. Enjoy.
-bill kenny
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