Joe Arpaio Pardon Is Brought To You By Alex Jones And His Vampire Invasion

Regular readers know we quite enjoy lampooning Alex Jones and his “news” outfit InfoWars.

Alex is of course a standing joke. The stories he pushes are so far-fetched that I’m no longer sure “conspiratorial” is an adequate descriptor. Indeed, it’s no longer clear that the English language is a sufficient tool when it comes to communicating how fantastical Alex’s “stories” have become.

Everyone is familiar with the “hits.” There’s Pizzagate, there’s the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, there’s the contention that George Soros is engaged in an effort to enhance the potency of marijuana, and of course there’s the infamous tap water/gay frogs “theory.”

Of course Alex doesn’t believe much – if any – of what he says on his show. As he explained to the court during a recent custody battle, he’s “playing a character.”

A “character” who, as it turns out, spends a non-trivial amount of time selling InfoWars-branded products that not coincidentally could be perceived by listeners as “solutions” to the “problems” he shrieks about on camera.

The main problem with Alex Jones is that his lies are starting to have real-world consequences. People believe his crazy shit even if he doesn’t, and one of the people Jones has managed to dupe is Donald Trump.

Trump famously appeared on InfoWars in 2015 and assured Jones that he “wouldn’t be disappointed” in a Trump presidency and hilariously opined that InfoWars’ “reputation is amazing,” a contention that Alex would certainly not make if you ever manage to catch him off camera, in an honest moment or, perhaps more poignantly, if you ever divorce him and try to take his children away.

Again, Trump doesn’t understand that InfoWars is entertainment, just like so many netizens don’t understand that the alt-Right blogs they read are profit machines designed to maximize clicks while staying just barely on the right side of legal.

Recently, John Kelly has sought to limit Trump’s exposure to Jones. Here’s Politico:

The new system, laid out in two memos co-authored by Kelly and Porter and distributed to Cabinet members and White House staffers in recent days, is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted. Kelly’s deputy, Kristjen Nielson, is also expected to assume an integral role.

In a subsequent report, Axios specifically named InfoWars as an outlet that’s in Kelly’s crosshairs:

Just to give you an idea of what Trump is “missing out” on thanks to what Right-wing websites are decrying as some kind of undue censorship, here is what InfoWars led with a couple of days ago:

You can go and read that story for yourself, or you can just trust me when I tell you that “no”, Alex didn’t quite get there with the “final proof” bit.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “I already know this Heisenberg and while it’s always funny to read about Alex, why now, on Saturday?”

Well, this is why:

That’s right: Alex Jones interviewed Joe Arpaio this week after Trump basically promised to pardon him at the Phoenix rally.

Now you can watch that for yourself, but the overarching point here is that Alex Jones is quite clearly helping to dictate what the President of the United States decides to do and people like “good old” Joe are complicit in this egregious crime against responsible journalism.

Again, there are no words to describe how absurd this is, so what we’ll do instead is just leave you with a little compare and contrast exercise.

Here is what Arpaio says about Jones in the interview embedded above:

You get out there and you tell it like it is.

And here is Jones “telling it like it is”: