The Comedians Who Love Alex Jones

I was struck by Joe Rogan’s passing reference to Alex Jones in his Netflix special on Saturday, a joke that came amidst a longer diatribe about trans people. “Listen,” Rogan said, “he’s right about a lot of things—he was wrong about that one thing, though. But he’s right—the wrong thing was a big one. But he’s right—that one thing was huge. But he’s often correct.” 

The joke, which Jones is already using in promotional videos on Twitter, struck me as a bellwether of Jones’s growing influence over Rogan’s little corner of comedy, one that has perhaps grown naturally with Rogan’s own influence. Rogan himself has long been a fan and friend of the conspiracy theorist, having hosted him several times on the Joe Rogan Experience. Many of Rogan’s acolytes count themselves among Jones’s admirers, even in spite of that “one thing” he got wrong—his repeated claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag attack where no one died.

Since I’ve never written about this before, I thought I might take a brief look at Alex Jones's constituency in comedy. Like so much else I cover here, his acceptance among comedians neatly illustrates the path fringe ideas take to the mainstream. As you'll see, it's pretty much a straight line.

Joe Rogan

Let’s start with Rogan. Jones has appeared on JRE three times: in 2017 with flat-earther Eddie Bravo, in 2019 on his own, and in 2020 with Tim Dillon. That last episode, which occurred a few months after JRE partnered up with Spotify in a $100 million deal, caused some controversy. Among other things, Jones spouted off lies about Covid, vaccines, gender reassignment surgery, and climate change. As that controversy broiled, Rogan said he would invite Jones back soon. 

The substance of Jones’s other appearances on JRE are what you’d expect: the same garbage he brings everywhere he goes. More interesting, perhaps, are Rogan’s reflections on those appearances. Here’s what he said on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2022, in response to a question about his role in national affairs: 

I think you can revitalize and rehabilitate someone's image in a way that is pretty shocking. Look at the way people look at Alex Jones now, because Alex Jones has been on my podcast a few times. The people that have watched those podcasts think he's hilarious, and they think that he definitely fucked up with that whole Sandy Hook thing, but he's right more than he's wrong, and he's not an evil guy. He's just a guy who's had some psychotic breaks in his life, he's had some genuine mental health issues that he's addressed, he's had some serious bouts of alcoholism, some serious bouts of substance abuse, and they've contributed to some very poor thinking. 

But if you know the guy, if you get to know him, like I have, I've known him for more than 20 years. And if you know him on podcasts, you realize like, he is genuinely trying to unearth some things that are genuinely disturbing for most people. Like, this is a guy that was telling me about Epstein's island a fucking decade ago, at least. He was telling me about it. I was like, what? You're telling me there's a place where they bring elites to compromise them with underage girls and they film them. Really? Like what? Cut the fuck out of here. Like no, President Clinton's been there, everyone's been there. Like what? It sounds like nonsense. And not only is it true, but people keep getting fucking murdered for it. Did you see that latest Clinton advisor that got murdered about it? Yeah, hung with an extension cord, shot himself in the chest 30 miles from his house, and they're calling it a suicide.

Interesting, right? Despite all the times he’s denied and downplayed his own influence, Rogan clearly recognizes his power to legitimize people like Jones, a power that relies largely on humor. Through him, audiences can see that Jones is funny—that he’s a human being, not a monster. 

The segment also offers a preview of what Rogan said a few nights ago: that Jones is right more often than he is wrong. This happens to be Tim Dillon’s take as well.

Tim Dillon

Dillon has been listening to Alex Jones since he was a teenager, as he said in his podcast a few weeks ago. They first worked together in 2020, when he guested on an episode of Infowars with his producer at the time. As he told it on a podcast debriefing the appearance, Rogan helped set it up; later, Jones said that Rogan called him as early as 2019 trying to set up a collaboration between the two.

Jones has appeared on several episodes of Dillon’s podcast since, including the episode I excerpted above, where he postulated that the Trump assassination attempt was a deep state plot. Those other appearances include a March 2023 Patreon episode where he described one of the ongoing defamation cases against him as “a fake trial” and insisted on the innocence of alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate (whom Dillon had recently interviewed). 

Then there’s the New Year’s Eve livestream Dillon held for his Patreon subscribers in 2020, in which Jones appeared for about an hour to rant about election fraud and vaccines. I’ll spare you the excerpts, which I worry might cause psychological damage. Suffice it to say, he claims that there’s video footage of election officials “flipping votes in live time,” says Republicans aren’t pushing back on the “orgy” of fraud because they hate Trump (“Mitch McConnell’s wife is on the Chi-com, Chinese Communist payroll,” he notes), argues that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates helped create Covid-19 in Wuhan and released it when Trump survived his impeachment trial, assures viewers they can’t die of a virus if they take the right vitamins (zinc, C, and D3), reveals that inter-dimensional aliens are working with globalists to “kill everybody” and build “a post-human world,” and finally plugs the rallies he planned in DC for the following week. 

“I organized and fundraised the big events coming up next week on the fifth and sixth,” he says. “Giant events with millions of people in DC. No one would step up. I did it.”

"Had somebody like him been listened to, they might've been able to save certain women from being abused."

In segments reflecting on Jones and their episodes together, Dillon paints him as a complex, deeply human figure ultimately deserving of sympathy. Like Rogan, he believes Jones has gotten more right than he’s gotten wrong, and he seems to suggest that Jones may not even have been responsible for the stuff he got wrong. He’s also particularly riled up about the various platforms that banned Jones, which he sees as a fundamentally illegitimate act of censorship. Throughout all his commentary runs an unmistakeable admiration for his friend and role mode.

“It's gotta be amazing to be a guy who was telling everybody about Epstein years before—to be proven right, and to have that mean ultimately nothing,” Dillon says in a 2021 episode for Patreon members:

To get no accolades for that. Had somebody like him been listened to, they might've been able to save certain women from being abused. But he doesn't get any respect for that. And a lot of it is because Sandy Hook just sucked all the air out of the room. And for good reason. A lot of people are unwilling to see him even as a human being because of Sandy Hook, which I understand. Because it is horrible when the parents of children that have been murdered have to move and disguise themselves. It is absurd. 

Now, how responsible he is for that, I truly—and I'm not trying to get away with something here—I truly don't know. Because I wasn't really watching him during that period. Supposedly he downplays how much he questioned Sandy Hook. I have heard from other people that is not correct, and that he questioned Sandy Hook all the time repeatedly. But I don't know. If I knew, I would tell you. I just don't remember. I don't remember him talking about Sandy Hook. 

“He's done some good,” Dillon concludes, “he's done some bad. You know, he's truly a fascinating American character in a way that very few people are.” 

He was similarly evasive in a Patreon-exclusive episode recapping their joint JRE appearance a few months earlier. Again insisting that Jones has done good deeds, like bringing attention to Jeffrey Epstein, he expanded on his ambivalence about the Sandy Hook case, describing the controversy in a manner that conspicuously downplayed Jones’s own culpability. 

He had Wolfgang Halbig on, and Wolfgang Halbig said a lot of stuff about Sandy Hook. And what basically happened was the Sandy Hook conspiracy grew a rabid online following and then they started to harass the families, which was horrible, and then start, you know, saying that these kids didn't die and show me your death certificate and blah, blah, blah, blah […] So Alex is being sued. Now, because Alex, some of Alex's fans obviously did the inhuman thing of harassing families whose children died. Those people should be in jail […]  So these people went around harassing people, and then people had to move. Like this is fucking nuts, right? People had to move. So then Alex Jones was just deplatformed off everything you could imagine. I mean, they took him off every social media thing, he had trouble getting credit cards, blah blah blah.

[…]

He had this really disgraceful incident with Sandy Hook. I still don't know enough about it to know how at fault he was. I think Alex questions every single thing. I think a lot of his fans are maniacs, so then they will go do things. And then you're like, well, I don't know, is it my—if I question something on my show and a couple of my crazy fans go do something, how much responsibility do I bear for that? I don’t know. I don’t think I bear a lot of responsibility for that. I do understand, obviously, the connection, the link between what he said or did and then what they said or did.

And he was just deplatformed off everything, which me and Rogan and a lot of people said is not the right move. You start censoring people, getting rid of them without any due process, without any type of system. You just arbitrarily—billionaires in the shadow, billionaire tech CEOs and boards of their companies able to eliminate people from the national conversation and eliminate their ability to make a living is a problem.

In a Patreon episode released last year, Dillon reflected on what exactly it is about Jones that attracts comedians, who’ve long been in his orbit. Patrice O’Neal appeared on Infowars in 2010; Doug Stanhope had Jones open for him at an Austin show in 2002; Jones was a guest on Opie & Anthony in 2013. “Comics have always been fascinated by him,” Dillon says:

I certainly have. I know Joe has. Because I think comics make their living exploring ideas. Some are popular, some are not popular. That's how comedians make their living. And Alex Jones has made a living and a very good living up until recently exploring ideas. And many of them have gotten him into trouble, and one of them has destroyed his life, which was Sandy Hook. But it's interesting that he's been consistently around comedy and comedians. He likes comedy and comedians. And comedians have always had a relationship with Alex, where they are fascinated by him. 

He's been this independent guy. Obviously he's not on any network other than Infowars, the one that he built. And comedians have always watched that, and comedians have always looked at the government and said—not all comedians—but a lot of comedians have looked at the government and went, "We're being lied to," or "Something's not right," or "Let's look at things that don't add up and let's make them funny." And Alex does the same thing. And sometimes he is very funny about it, but a lot of times he's enraged and passionate and articulate, and sometimes he's crazy and he goes way overboard. But it is something that is a uniquely American life.

Just like Rogan, he stresses how funny Jones is. (I don’t see it, but taste is subjective.) You may notice that this is the same reason many comedians are enamored with Donald Trump, or at least what they claim to be the reason: he’s funny. They feel solidarity as entertainers, a solidarity that I suspect is buttressed by the mass persecution complex that afflicts so many in comedy.

As a reader pointed out to me, it’s notable that the “one thing” Rogan and Dillon admit Jones got wrong is the one he was found legally liable for. This is the same logic comedians like them apply to allegations of sexual misconduct, dismissing anything that hasn’t been proven in a court of law. Dillon, for instance, has said in multiple episodes that he doesn’t know what to make of the charges against Andrew Tate, who was very nice when they met and is the sort of person that powerful figures might want to bring down; he saw no evidence of sex trafficking when he visited Tate’s compound himself, figuring that all the women were very quiet because that’s just what women are like in eastern Europe.

It's certainly commendable to reserve one's judgment on serious issues. Still, I can't help but notice how rarely Dillon and his ilk see fit to do so; they spend a great deal of their lives rendering judgment on a wide range range of subjects, both on camera and onstage. It's almost like they opt for studied ambivalence only when their friends and fellow travelers are under the microscope.

Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker

Recall Dillon’s remark that “comedians have always watched” Infowars. Two such comics are Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker, who have praised Jones again and again over the years. (McCusker is also a fan of David Icke, the Holocaust denier—but who's keeping track.) Consider this exchange from April 2020:

Gillis: Dude, I got fucking red-pilled hard by Alex Jones this week.

McCusker: Yo, which video did you watch?

Gillis: I just watched the whole, you can watch them all live the next day. You can watch the full episode. I just watched the last—

McCusker: What's he on right now? Is he on YouTube? What channel, what thing?

Gillis: He’s on banned-dot-video. Banned-dot-video.

McCusker: Banned-dot-video, dude. 

[…]

Gillis: Look, dude, here's the truth. You need to get some fucking zinc and some vitamin D3 and some vitamin C and you're going to beat this virus. And it's not even—Matt, I'll tell you something, it's not some natural virus. This is clearly manmade. If you put this under a microscope, you'd be able to see it. It's like seeing tits that have scars.

McCusker: Really?

Gillis: Bro, those are fake.

McCusker: Did you see the thing—

Gillis: Covid? Come on man.

McCusker: Did you see the thing on—

Gillis: This thing’s fake. This was made, the Chi-coms made this and it leaked out of their factory. I mean it's a stage four level containment in Wuhan, but it definitely leaked. They have leaks all the time. Whether this was intentional or not, this was a bioweapon from the Chi-coms. 

McCusker: I don't think it was a—so I watched a video on YouTube from a guy who had lived in China for 10 years, who came back. And he was saying that this was an accident, but the coverup is real. So they were apparently—he's like, this is all public record.

Gillis: Oh, the cover up's very very real.

McCusker: Well, he was saying, you can look up all these records. A lady was studying the links between bats and coronaviruses and specifically the transmission from coronavirus, from bats to humans. And apparently when you isolate a virus—this is according to the video—when you isolated a virus—

Gillis: Well, I think she took her work home. And I think probably her husband got into the fridge and fucking was like, "oh, nice." And just munched a bat.

McCusker: She has a dream job, dude. Like researching pizza here. Yeah, apparently when you study a virus, you gotta amp it up a little bit.

[…]

McCusker: I got real into a guy recently. He just was talking that mess and I was liking it, and I went to his website and it was just like, "And please take a minute, let's all acknowledge the climate hoax." And I was like, goddammit. I like this guy. I want to get into this. This guy was against secret societies, so he was starting his own. I told you about this secret society—

Gillis:  Dude, all those guys are re—ded. All these secret society, most of the conspiracy secret society—I know I just got red pilled and this is counter, counter, you know, intui—whatever. Fuck words. Most of these guys are re—ds.

McCusker: Alex Jones is brilliant.

Gillis: Alex Jones is clearly brilliant, but like—

McCusker: Either way. If he's kidding, he's the funniest person alive. If he's not kidding, he's even funnier.

Gillis: Yeah, dude, I agree. Alex Jones definitely rules. Alex Jones fucking rules. Agreed. A hundred percent. But it is funny to watch him be like, bringing in a doctor, and then he'll be like, "Doctor, what do we need? What's coronavirus doing to us?” And he's like, "You just need zinc and Vitamin D3." And he's like, "That's perfect. We're selling zinc and Vitamin D3 on our website."

McCusker: Did you ever see when, I dunno if you ever noticed, when he first takes calls, the first caller is always like, "Hey Alex, gotta say, I just love what you're doing out here. I just took the supplements, man.” Every time his first caller calls in to say how much he loves him, how awesome he is, and how awesome his supplements are.

Gillis: [Cross-talk] His supplements definitely are—Alex Jones is jacked.

McCusker: Oh, he is dude, he is. His neck is huge.

Gillis: Alex Jones is the man.

Again we find ourselves in a magical world where facts and logic take a backseat to entertainment value. For Gillis and McCusker, Jones’s skills as a performer render the truth of his claims irrelevant; it probably helps that, like Rogan, they are already inclined to conspiratorial thought. In case there’s any doubt about this, the following exchange occurs later in the episode:

McCusker: Do you think Zika virus is a bioweapon? 

Gillis: Actually, yes. 

McCusker: Is it really?

Gillis: Yes.

McCusker: Doesn’t it make people’s heads huge?

Gillis: No, it makes them really small. 

McCusker: Oh, okay. Never mind, my bad.

Gillis: Actually, if you google it and look at the babies, they actually kind of look like—it just makes your baby look like baby Yoda.

McCusker: Really?

Gillis: Screen share and google “Zika baby” […] No, Zika I think, was a government, it was a—they were trying to kill brown people.

McCusker: What?

Gillis: Yeah dude, these people hate human lives. These are globalist Satanists.

McCusker: True, Satanists, obviously. 

Gillis: They were trying to—the whole point—look at the UN, dude. You can look at the UN’s website, they’re not afraid to tell you exactly what they’re doing.

McCusker: What are they up to?

Gillis: They’re trying to get rid of the human population.

McCusker: True, they’re trying to kill us. 

Gillis: They’re trying to kill half the human population, dude. This is Thanos. 

McCusker: I mean, If I had that much money, I might kill a half the human population.

Gillis: Yeah, I'm broke and I'd like to kill half of us.

That was in 2020, about a week after McCusker himself came down with Covid and claimed to eradicate it by taking a hot bath. Both he and Gillis remain loyal fans of Jones to this day. Neither Jones's commentary on Covid-19 nor the 2020 election (to say nothing of his massive losses in the Sandy Hook defamation cases) were enough to lose their faith. In a Patreon episode released on June 4th, they lamented Jones’s legal and financial troubles:

Gillis: It does suck. Poor guy.

McCusker: He’ll be back. It’s not the end of him, man. If anything it’s just, I mean, he said before he was ready to give his life to the war on the globalists, and they for sure, they really have come after him.

Gillis: Yeah, he called it. It was kind of sad. Did you watch the clip of him crying? He was like, “I’m tired, man.” He’s like, “This has been a long hard war, dude, I’m so tired.” Yeah. And then they went on Twitter live and had people calling, they’re like, “We’re never going to give up, Alex, we love you.” 

McCusker: That’s awesome. 

Gillis: Yeah, he’s hilarious. So what, dude, he was wrong about Sandy Hook. 

McCusker: He was right about a bunch of other stuff. He claims that he was getting just bad info and he spit it out.

Gillis: He apologized about it before—

McCusker: They all came out?

Gillis: Yeah.

McCusker: Yeah dude, that’s kind of fucked. 

Gillis: Years before.

McCusker: That’s crazy. I mean, how many things do you have to have said about that before they give you an $80 million fine?

Two weeks later, on June 18th, Gillis said he got riled up watching an MSNBC segment “bragging about censoring people” with objectionable ideas:

Gillis: They just showed a clip of Alex Jones crying, and they were like—

McCusker: Dude, that’s so fucking lame.

Gillis: It was weird.

McCusker: Just tier one dude, they’re tier one.

Gillis: It was weird for the mainstream media to be onscreen bragging about how good it is to censor bad ideas. If you think they’re a bad idea, to censor it like that.

McCusker: It’s crazy. Yeah, they’re on their fucking bullshit again.

Gillis: I know that’s like the most old man right-wing thing I can say, but it was weird. I was just sitting there watching it like—‘cause I never watch it. And then I turn it on and be like, “It can’t be as bad as people say.” It’s literally some hot lady bragging about Alex Jones being ruined and crying. 

McCusker: They’re always like, “He’s a weirdo, don’t even listen to him,” and they’re kind of obsessed with the guy. It’s like dude, just don’t listen to him.

Gillis: That’s all they got. If you turn it on right now, they’re talking about Trump. 

McCusker: Yeah. “He’s going to jail, we busted him for Russia, he’s going to jail, there’s a porn star, he’s a Russian asset.” I mean a lot of it, too—if you just run those stories enough, it’s going to sway people’s thinking.

Gillis: It’s real. It becomes real. And then—yeah. It was firing me up. 

McCusker: Dickheads. Leave Jones, man, just leave the man alone. 

Gillis: Let him go. 

McCusker: He’s a fucking entertainer. His show is objectively good. 

Gillis: He’s having fun.

McCusker: In terms of his performance, it’s fantastic.  

Once again, it’s notable that Gillis and McCusker do not seem particularly concerned with the extent to which Jones actually means what he says. I wonder if that’s because, like Dillon and Rogan, they largely agree with him. He was right about a lot, you say? I'd love to hear what.

Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh

Credit where due: Gillis and McCusker have never had Jones on their show or appeared on his. (Gillis did say in 2022 that he asked his agents if he could go on on Infowars, but they were cold on the idea.) This is more than we can say for Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh, who had Jones on their podcast Flagrant twice in 2021. When his first appearance was removed by Youtube, they brought him back two months later and put a lengthy disclaimer at the beginning of the episode. (“The owners of the channels as well as the speakers in the video will never condone hate speech and condemn it in all its entirety," it said: haha, sure.)

"He’s a fucking fun hang, dude. I don't know what else to tell you outside of that."

Chatting with his cohosts after Jones's first appearance, Schulz commended himself for his unsparing treatment of the Sandy Hook issue. In fact, he let Jones get away with a long stream of lies: in short, that he never actually said Sandy Hook didn’t happen, he merely covered claims to that effect on the message boards 4chan and 8chan, and he played devil’s advocate with the actual deniers’ theories even though he didn’t believe them. Then, he said, when Hillary Clinton started running for president, she decided to attack Trump for his association with Jones, and suddenly the media wouldn’t shut up about how he questioned Sandy Hook. “I never said 90% of what they said,” Jones claimed. “It became just a political tool and that’s all that was.”

Like Dillon and Rogan, Schulz and his cohosts can only find fault with what Jones has already been found legally liable for, and even this fails to inspire any critical treatment of his present claims. In the second appearance, for instance, Jones argued unchallenged that media companies like CNN paid Antifa $90,000 to infiltrate the January 6th rally on Capitol Hill: 

They were the ones saying “Burn it down, let’s go.” And there were people who infiltrated the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who 100 percent—I’ve seen the videos—did mount up, believe they were under Trump’s command, through Q—Q is this 8chan thing—and it was telling them, we later learned in hindsight, “Attack, attack” […] Out of a million people, they tricked maybe 600 or so to go into the Capitol. What happened was terrible, I’m against it. But now they’ve tried to blame me for that. 

What do Schulz and his cohosts think of their guest? They love him. “He’s a fucking fun hang, dude,” Schulz said after that first appearance. “I don't know what else to tell you outside of that. You might hate him, but you’re like, ‘Just talk while I’m around.’”

A Few Thoughts

I will offer two quick thoughts in conclusion. The first is that in my years writing about the right’s influence in comedy, I have often encountered the criticism that I am drawing tenuous connections between comedians and extremists: effectively, that X or that comedian is Y degrees removed from Z far-right figure who maybe appeared on a podcast years ago. 

I hope this piece helps make clear how intimate the connections really are. There is nothing tenuous about them, there are no endless degrees of separation. The problem is not that some comedians appeared once or twice on Gavin McInnes’s podcast network in 2017. It’s that right now, in 2024, some of comedy's biggest names love and listen to some of the worst people in all of American media.

Second, as I’ve discussed before, a common defense of these comedians holds that their various questionable beliefs aren’t actually problematic because they’re comedians and their audiences know it. People can easily distinguish comedy from reality and fact from fiction, I hear over and over again, so there’s nothing dangerous about a few podcasters dabbling in conspiracy theories or transphobia or racism or what have you.

I hope Alex Jones’s hold on comedy illustrates how flimsy this argument is. The comedians discussed in this piece are among the most popular working today. They have downloaded huge segments of their personalities and ideologies directly from Jones, whom they find compelling precisely because he’s an entertaining performer. Are we to believe their own fans are any less impressionable?

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