How fake is Alex Jones?

Alex Jones and a cake shaped like a gun

The shocking fact you need to know about Alex Jones is that he’s 43 years old. What happened? Maybe yelling stretches your face out. Perhaps knowledge of vast conspiracies has overtaxed his system. Or maybe he looks like a 43 year-old who got mutated in a tanning booth explosion 53 years ago because only his character is forty-three. The guy who plays him is older. Did you not realize, as I had not, that Alex Jones of Infowars and The Alex Jones Show is a character played by the performance artist Alex Jones? That’s what custody claimant Alex Jones’s lawyer recently argued in Travis County District Court, in the matter of Jones v. Jones. I quote the Austin American-Statesman:

At a recent pretrial hearing, attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”

“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”

Hold the phone—is Alex Jones breaking kayfabe? Never break kayfabe. The only time it’s okay is when your kids are on the line, as in the 1980s WWF storyline where Macho Man Randy Savage pretended to break kayfabe by wearing a suit and appearing  in family court as Randall Saváge, but then his essentially macho nature broke through and he hit his kids with a chair. Anyway, if you ever wanted to pin down Alex Jones and ask him whether he believes all the conspiracies his show presents as news, now is the time in Travis County.

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Ravalli treasurer claims conspiracy, demands guard, does not have progress report

Ravalli County treasurer Valerie Stamey, photographed by Alex Sakariassen of the Independent

Ravalli County treasurer Valerie Stamey, photographed by Alex Sakariassen of the Independent

Yesterday, the Ravalli County Commission met for a weekly update from embattled treasurer Valerie Stamey, whose office has not produced a financial report since September. Since the last time commissioners formally met with Stamey, news broke that she had fled a default judgement in South Carolina after double-cashing an $18,000 check. She also appears to have defaulted on a mortgage she filed on her home there in 2007, after she had moved to Montana. Stamey addressed neither of these issues with the commission, nor did she mention the county financial reports. She did, however, accuse commissioners Greg Chilcott and JR Iman of conspiring to illegally sell tax liens and orchestrating a “vile campaign to destroy my character.”

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

Representative Bachmann (R-MN) waits for someone to feed her a cricket.

It’s been a long time since we’ve used our oscilloscopes to peer inside the extradimensional manifold known as Michele Bachmann’s head. Frankly, that place weirds us out. Since Representative Bachmann went from being a person who stood no chance of becoming president to being a person whom no other people thought stood a chance of et cetera, we’ve welcomed the respite from her mouth-sounds. Unfortunately, it was only the eye of the storm. On Friday, while the Combat! interns were distracted by Japandroids, Bachmann came roaring back to demand that national security agencies investigate infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into the US government. Strap on your fallacy masks; we’re going inside.

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Too big to punish?

Charles Holliday, Chairman of the Board of Bank of America

The City of Baltimore has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, alleging that banks deprived the city of millions in investment income by conspiring to fix the London interbank offered rate. Stay with me. Like all aspects of banking except robbery, the Libor is extremely boring. It is the benchmark interest rate at which banks loan money to one another, and it provides the basis for interest calculations on a variety of investments, loans and other financial instruments. When the Libor goes up, banks pay more for cash flow loans, and some investments yield more. When it goes down, banks pay less and some investments yield less. According to Peter Shapiro, an advisor to Baltimore and other municipal investors, “about 75 percent of major cities” have lost money due to Libor manipulation.

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Conservatives accuse own conference of gay takeover, Muslim conspiracy

Glenn Beck shouts "Howard Stern's penis!" into the microphone at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, shortly before being dragged offstage.

The Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and Liberty University have all pulled out of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, citing CPAC’s inclusion of GOProud as proof of “how committed they are to advancing the homosexual agenda.” Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Obviously, the Republican Party has been taken over by a gay conspiracy; any schoolchild will tell you that. What you may not know is that several members of the CPAC board are also under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. So says Pamela Geller and several other conference participants, who claim that directors Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, of all people, are secret Islamic supremacists. Seriously. I’m not saying that contemporary conservatism is defined by conspiracy theories, bigotry and religious persecution, but I am saying that if you put a bunch of spiders in the same jar, don’t be surprised when someone gets his liquefied organs sucked out.

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