Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson’s Embrace of Alex Jones Is a Grim Watershed Moment For Far-Right, Conspiratorial Media

Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media via AP, Pool, File

After the events of the past week, Alex Jones likely now has the largest platform he has ever had to spout off the kinds of conspiracy theories and disinformation that not only made him famous but led to years of vile harassment of parents whose elementary school-age children were brutally murdered by a deranged gunman.

Last week, Jones was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on his X/Twitter show and was fawned over by the former top-rated Fox News host. Carlson repeatedly claimed that Jones is known for his years of accurate predictions and at one point, after Jones talked about a “post-human world,” “smart dust” being put in our food, and accused the FBI of “cooking the bomb” used in the first World Trade Center bombing, Carlson concluded, “I agree with pretty much everything that you said.”

A few days later, X owner Elon Musk reinstated Jones’s account on the platform. The account was permanently banned in September of 2018 for “abusive behavior,” reportedly related to a “heated exchange” between Jones and a CNN reporter. Musk then welcomed Jones back with a Twitter Spaces event that included some of the far-right’s most notorious figures like avowed white nationalist Jackson Hinkle, accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, and “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.

At the time of its ban, Jones’s Twitter account had just over 850,000 followers, but by Monday afternoon, following his event with Musk, the account had well over 1.6 million followers – almost doubling in 24 hours. X appeared on Monday to be actively promoting the account.

Jones is currently on the hook for some $1.5 billion in damages after being found guilty of defaming the families of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Jones’s years of promoting the claim that the murdered children and their parents were “crisis actors” playing roles in some kind of government-coordinated “false flag” operation aimed at destroying the Second Amendment resulted in widespread harassment. The families of the Sandy Hook victims eventually sued Jones for sending the far-right fever swamps after them and testified in court about being hounded by Jones’s followers, who desecrated their children’s graves to try and prove Jones correct.

“To hear people were desecrating it and urinating on it and threatening to dig it up, I don’t know how to articulate to you what that feels like, but that’s where we are,” Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was killed at Sandy Hook, testified in court in 2022.

Musk himself was initially repulsed at the idea of ever letting Jones back on the platform he spent $44 billion to buy. “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame,” Musk tweeted in November 2022 when asked if he would bring Jones back.

Now, just a little over a year later, Jones is back with a vengeance and has a whole new, remarkably more friendly media environment to push his wild conspiracy theories. The through-line in Jones’s conspiracy theories is often the baseless claim that the government or some secret cabal of powerbrokers caused tragic events for their own benefit. Jones’s claims often include pitting Americans against each other, attacking law enforcement, and claiming that a second civil war is imminent.

Jones, whose later conspiracies found inspiration in the deadly Waco, Texas siege on the Branch Davidian compound, rose to prominence on Texas public access television in the late 1990s, pushing the same kind of anti-government rhetoric that he espouses today.

Jones has claimed the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 terror attacks, that former President Barack Obama was the “global head of al-Qaeda” and was secretly arming ISIS, and that the CIA is pushing “transgenderism” in a “plan to depopulate humanity.”

Furthermore, Jones has made all kinds of wild claims over the years, infamously accusing the government of turning Americans homosexual with chemicals in the water and that is why “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.” He also said that the “normalization of mental illness” is an “evil pedophile plot to sexualize and destroy children” and that the government has secret “weather weapons” it uses against U.S. citizens.

“We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force,” Jones claimed in 2013.

Fast-forward to 2023 and Jones has now been fully embraced by the richest man on the planet who owns one of the world’s most influential social media platforms and was just boosted and praised for his historical “precision” in making predictions by one of the most influential voices on the right, who is also considered a top contender to be Trump’s running mate in 2024 – Tucker Carlson.

Jones and Carlson both returning to X in recent months undoubtedly marks a shift on the platform and a watershed moment in mass media in general as the far-right has found a new mechanism for reaching more and more people outside of websites like InfoWars or the Gateway Pundit – the result of which will be an even greater infusion of poisonous conspiracy theories into the political discourse.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.