DAILY BANTER: Let’s take a ride down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, shall we? Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings when an InfoWars stooge crashed several law enforcement press conferences, I was speaking with The Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen about Alex Jones. We were joking about circulating a rumor that Jones was actually a government covert operative manufactured and trained to infiltrate the fringe conspiracy theory groups on the far-right. Ben and I speculated that perhaps the government had instructed “Special Agent Jones” to invent a roster of crazy over-the-top theories meant to deliberately distract conspiracy theorists from real-life conspiracies. You know the list. FEMA is constructing concentration camps; juice boxes are stripping men of their testosterone in order to produce more gay people; the moon landing was faked; Obama is an al-Qaida operative, all of it delivered in the form of googly-eyed, self-satirical performance art that includes Joker make-up and throat-chafing rants about 1776 rising again — the wet fever-dreams of 
paranoid schizophrenics, thus distracting them from other, more heinous government black-ops because, you know, they were getting too close to the truth. In other words, Jones himself is a false flag. MORE
NATIONAL REVIEW: It’s important to bear in mind just how out-there unstable Jones appears to be. This is the man who, after going on a high-speed paranoiac rant on Piers Morgan Tonight about gun control, returned to his Manhattan hotel room to make a video in which he claimed to be under surveillance by hostile government agents. This is the man who proudly describes himself as the nation’s preeminent 9/11-truther. This is the man who, as Alexander Zaitchik put it in a Rolling Stone profile, makes Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck “sound like tea-sipping NPR hosts on Zoloft.” MORE
ROLLING STONE: A stocky 37-year-old with a flop of brown hair and a beer gut, Jones usually bounds into the studio, eager to launch into one of his trademark tirades against the “global Stasi Borg state” — the corporate-surveillance prison planet that he believes is being secretly forged by an evil cabal of bankers, industrialists, politicians and generals. This morning, though, Jones looks deflated. Five days ago, a mentally disturbed 22-year-old named Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd in Tucson, Arizona, killing six and seriously wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner was reported to be a fan of Loose Change, a film Jones produced that has become the bible for those who believe 9/11 was an inside job. All week, Jones has been twisting in the media crossfire. Now, his staff plays him a clip of a new attack by Limbaugh. In it, the conservative icon bemoans the social rot caused by three films that prominently feature Jones, including Loose Change.
“So a conspiracy movie,” Limbaugh bellows, “appears to be the most influential media of this young man’s life.” Jones begins to fume. “What a whore Limbaugh is,” he mutters. “All of them. Just a bunch of whores for the Borg state. Get the clip ready. I wanna talk about this.” Limbaugh’s comments, Jones declares, are nothing but a “transpartisan McCarthyite attack on everything not 100 percent inside their little thought bubble.” He points out that Loose Change has been viewed by at least 50 million people. “During these societal upheavals, it’s messy,” he says. “A lot of bad things happen. And yeah, you’re gonna have paranoid schizophrenics that get set off by the crazy things corporations and governments are doing, and by those who are exposing it to them. But we can’t allow ourselves to become paralyzed. If a schizophrenic takes three hits of acid in the forest and sees demons in the trees, and snaps, do you cut down the trees?” Jones being Jones, he’s not sure the Tucson rampage is as simple as a psychotic snap. Turning over the possibilities sends the tendrils of his anti-government imagination into wild motion. “The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” he says. “This kid Loughner disappeared for days at a time before the shooting? My gut tells me this was a staged mind-control operation. The government employs geometric psychological-warfare experts that know exactly how to indirectly manipulate unstable people through the media. They implanted the idea in his head by repeatedly asking, ‘Is Giffords in danger?'” MORE
LOS ANGELES TIMES: He certainly appeals to fear. Jones asserts that both the Oklahoma Citybombing and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated by the U.S. government as part of a scheme to promote a New World Order through “exploitable hysteria.” So it is no surprise that he is now pushing the idea that the Boston bombings were the nefarious handiwork of federal agents. At Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s press briefing just a few hours after the explosions, one of Jones’ minions, Dan Biondi, was on hand to ask the governor if this was a “staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote homeland security while sticking their hands down our pants on the streets?” “No,” Patrick replied tersely. “Next question.” Meanwhile, Jones was on the air, on Twitter and on the Internet pushing his claim that the FBI engineered the bombings under the “false flag” of a terrorist group as a pretense for expanding the power of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. He warned of TSA groping teams at sporting events “coming soon.” MORE
SALON: In a bizarre twist befitting a Hollywood conspiracy theory movie, the AP reports today that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was influenced by conspiracy theories, including Alex Jones’ website Infowars, which has been pushing a narrative that the Tsarnaev brothers were patsies set up by a government cabal to take the fall for the bombing. Tamerlan “took an interest in Infowars,” according to Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan’s sister. He was also apparently interested in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was trying to find a copy of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” one of the most notorious conspiracy tomes of history. There’s no doubt that Jones will take this report as confirmation of everything he’s been preaching. The report, he will claim, was planted in the AP — the government controls the media, after all — and is a naked attempt to discredit him and definitive proof that the globalist cabal views him as a serious threat. He was getting too close to the truth in Boston, so they decided to try to take him out. It’ll be a big shot in the arm to Jones’ grand theory of the bombings, which has suffered from an embarrassing lack of evidence and logical consistently . He said the government first planned to blame the Tea Party, but then was found out and had to switch Plan B — blame Muslim extremists — so with the AP report, Jones will say, the government is trying to return to Plan A. MORE
RELATED: There are those those who believe that there’s somebody out there for everybody. Including fans of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose specialized dating site for his listeners has gained some public attention little more than a month after opening. As Uproxx reported on Friday, “Dating Freedom Lovers” offers fans of Jones’ InfoWars program the chance to connect with “people that share a passion for liberty and freedom.” As it happens, Thursday also saw the hashtag #InfoWarsPickUpLines gain traction on Twitter, with users submitting bon mots like, “How about we get illuminaughty and you show me your nude world order?”; “Hey, girl. You look familiar. Have I seen you somewhere before? (Ah yes, at both Newtown and Aurora.)” and “I’d like to shoot all over your grassy knoll, if you know what I mean….” MORE
RAW STORY: Appearing on “The Alex Jones Show” Tuesday, rocker and National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent claimed the epidemic of soldier suicides that’s baffled some of the nation’s brightest psychologists is much easier to understand if you just blame President Barack Obama.“I’m sure the leftist blogs are gonna attack me, misquote me,” he began. “But I’ll tell you why more and more warrior heroes of the military are killing themselves: because they are in absolute frustration and heartbreak that their boss, their commander in chief violates the Constitution that he has made an oath to, while their hero warrior blood brothers are being blown to smithereens and blown up while executing their oath to the same Constitution that the president, the vice president and the attorney general violate.” MORE
MEDIA MATTERS: Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went on a rambling, transphobic rant during his radio show, warning that protecting the rights of transgender people will cause them to start “vomiting and crapping all over the place.” During the April 30 edition of his radio show, Jones launched a screed against the “globalist mafia,” which he blamed for efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people. After claiming that he isn’t bothered by transgender people — but that their “fake rights” don’t exist — Jones warned that “transvestites” would “throw up all over the walls” in public bathrooms. He continued by peddling a number of outrageous, damaging stereotypes about transgender people: MORE
RELATED: I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown, or any other shooting. I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else. Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss. I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is just afraid — they’re terrified of these victims. … I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell.’ MORE