Divorce Train Wrecks

When Is An Insane Conspiracy Theorist A Bad Parent?

Bizarre strategy in Alex Jones case.

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watch-thumbIn between daily rants about the government uses chemical warfare to make kids gay and weather machines, Infowars host Alex Jones is deeply embroiled in a custody battle with his ex-wife Kelly that’s set to begin jury selection today. And, in keeping with the host’s bizarre antics, the case has taken a curious turn with Alex’s own lawyer implying that he knows the insane conspiracy theorist has no business raising children.

He just doesn’t think that’s his client.

Rather, Randall Wilhite, representing Alex Jones, is arguing that everything we’ve seen on Infowars is just an act and should have no bearing on the fitness of the “real” Jones.

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.”

Really? Performance artists usually hurl feces at the Hamburglar and call it “American Seraphim: The Search For Belonging, No. 4” and… well, that does favorably compare to bitching about a Sesame Street puppet to protest vaccines.

This is an interesting strategy for Jones. Rather than defend his beliefs and argue that the courts have no right to break the family bond because he’s not “politically correct” — or proclaiming, as he’s discussed before, that maritime courts have no jurisdiction over him — they’ve decided to go straight to denouncing his on-air persona as an act.

It’s certainly hard to sell the nation’s leading tin-foil hat salesman as a positive role model, but trying to jettison his entire career at this juncture basically concedes his ex-wife’s point that “Infowars host Alex Jones” is an unfit father, thereby throwing all his eggs into the basket of a jury buying that a man who cultivated a mass following over 21 years in the business without betraying even a shred of insincerity was lying the whole time. Frankly, that’s a difficult sell on its own.

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For her part, Kelly Jones doesn’t think there are “two Alex Jones’s” and, moreover, that it wouldn’t matter if there were.

“He’s not a stable person,” she said of the man with whom her 14-year-old son and 9- and 12-year-old daughters have lived since her 2015 divorce. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.

“I’m concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress,” she said, referring to his recent comments about California Democrat Adam Schiff. “He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast.”

As her argument goes, even an act can be dangerous to impressionable minds, a fact bolstered by the 7 million monthly unique visitors Infowars claims every month.

Judge Orlinda Naranjo proclaims “[t]his case is not about Infowars, and I don’t want it to be about Infowars,” a statement that only makes sense from a woman who said she’d never heard of Alex Jones until last week. The more she sees of Jones’s all-consuming enterprise, the less she’ll be able to keep Infowars out of the discussion, one way or the other.

Regardless of how the jury decides this matter, what impact will this have on Infowars? Will the legions of wackadoo fans — and, let’s not forget Billy Corgan — abandon Jones as a fraud when word gets out that he’s officially claiming that his most unhinged ideas are all an act?

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No, they’ll probably blame it all on chemtrails. The only thing more difficult than winning sole custody is shaking the faith of a conspiracy nut.

In Travis County custody case, jury will search for real Alex Jones [Austin American-Statesman]
Alex Jones Is Just ‘Playing a Character,’ According to His Lawyer [Daily Intelligencer]
“He’s playing a character”: Alex Jones lawyer says Infowars host is “a performance artist” and not really a nutjob [Salon]

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