Alex Before Jones

(The face of evil. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

In the past I've made no bones about my utter, unrestrained loathing of right-wing crackpot radio "personality" Alex Jones, a man who I would have no moral qualms about physically harming if I met him on the street. I think he is a sick, twisted, pathetic excuse for a human being, and his crocodile tears and lip-service apologies do nothing to even begin to address the harm he's caused. A little smile graces my face every time he loses a court case and sinks even deeper into bankruptcy. This is not, you should note, how I normally talk about people. For me to speak of another human being in this way, they have to be a special kind of repugnant. Alex Jones is a special kind of repugnant.

But what has fascinated me lately is the fact that he wasn't always this way. In fact, before his legendary dive off the deep end, he was just a kooky, "fun-crazy," mostly harmless call-in DJ in Austin, who had deep connections with the various independent art movements taking shape around that time. Austin, then, was a breeding ground for a new type of outside-the-box weirdo, and Jones was just one of them. He appeared in two Richard Linklater films and King of the Hill co-creator Mike Judge used Jones as fodder for the show's hilarious conspiracy-addled nutjob Dale Gribble. Judge also made the disappointing decision to associate with him as recently as 2013, though I can find multiple later statements from him (as well as Linklater) condemning and disavowing Jones.

It's very odd to think of one of the most dangerous people in modern American media as an old-school "keep Austin weird" personality. That's the sort of vibe you generally don't associate with someone who terrorized the families of school shooting victims and made money off of it. Goes to show, the kinda sucking to totally sucking pipeline is very real. Stay safe out there, folks.

Unrelated thought: how much money do you think Alex Jones would take to appear on a podcast with me? Clearly the man is flat broke and I'd love to be able to verbally abuse him on the Internet. You'd think in this position he'd take what he can get. If you're reading this, hit me up, man. I wanna make you cry.