Alex Jones Will Repeat Unsubstantiated Rumors As Fact

A rare instance where the path from rumor to reporting can be drawn

If you listen to Alex Jones’ show enough, you will constantly hear him throw out wild allegations, and give incredibly vague justifications to back up his claims. It often comes in the form of appeals like “it’s been reported” or “it’s been declassified.” When he’s feeling fancy, he’ll say “it’s in the white papers.”

However it’s phrased, the source that’s being cited is almost always too unspecific for anyone to really track down, making assessing his claims all the more difficult.

In this post, we are going to look at an illustrative example of how a particular unsubstantiated story became something Alex would incorporate into his reporting as proven fact.

The Narrative

Transphobia is one of the hallmarks of Infowars’ worldview, and one of the narratives that fall into this category is Alex’s belief that Michelle Obama is secretly a trans woman. For a while, Alex alternated between sincerely espousing this belief and pretending that it was just a joke. Eventually, he gave up on pretending he was joking, and now he routinely calls Michelle “Big Mike.”

One of the reasons that Alex felt comfortable with staking this position is due to comments made by Joan Rivers back in 2014. She made a joke that Barack Obama was our first gay president, because Michelle was a trans woman. Rivers is a comedian known for jokes that border on tasteless, so this was definitely in the range of jokes one would expect her to make, but Alex took it deadly serious.

And that would be fitting, as Rivers made these comments in July 2014, and would go on to die in September.

She was 81 years old, but the appearance of this timeline is too good to not try to exploit. It was almost too obvious (for people addicted to connecting non-existent dots): Joan Rivers was killed in retaliation for revealing to the world that Michelle Obama was a trans woman.

It’s nonsense, but this is the a small leap compared to many of the forced connections in Alex Jones’ coverage.

In order to give this narrative a little more seasoning, Alex has repeatedly claimed that just before she died, there was fire coming out of Rivers’ mouth, “like a dragon.” Here are a few clips of him painting this picture:

Content warning for the following clip, as Alex uses slurs:

This is sensational reporting, and you definitely will not see this detail in other coverage of Rivers’ death. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did an investigation and found that the clinic she went to was negligent, and Rivers’ daughter would go on to sue them for malpractice, but nowhere in any of that will you find indications that she had fire coming out of her mouth “like a dragon.”

So where does this come from? Alex certainly seems to assert it as fact, over the course of multiple years, so you would expect that it to have a solid basis.

The Source

As it turns out, this all traces back to a random email that was sent to the Writers inbox at Infowars.

Merely receiving an email like this doesn’t necessarily establish anything because Infowars gets tons of email, and it’s plausible to believe that a lot of them never get read, and this is just a coincidence. However, in this case, news director Rob Dew replied to the email asking her to get her source to go on the record within hours.

Laurie does indicate a willingness to get in touch with her source, but she is unable to reach them. Rob tells her that they need to confirm some details before they can run with the story.

By the end of the day on Sept. 5, Laurie is still unable to reach the source and tells Rob this.

Days later, Laurie had not made contact with her source, and tells Rob she will let him know if she gets ahold of him.

One important caveat to make is that the collection of emails I have access to is incomplete. There is a theoretical possibility that, at some later point, this person emailed Rob Dew back and got him in contact with their source, but that strikes me as very unlikely, because a net that would capture these emails would almost certainly also catch any other replies on this chain.

The most plausible scenario is that a random person emailed Dew with second-hand gossip about Joan Rivers, which he then passed along to Alex, who used it as an prop to support his conspiracy theory that Rivers was killed for outing Michelle Obama as a trans woman.

On some level, the most interesting part of this peek behind the curtain is that Rob Dew even pretended to care about verifying this information before running with it.