A Texas jury on Friday ruled Infowars’ Alex Jones to pay $49.3 million in total compensation to the parents of a first-grader murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which Jones incorrectly claimed was staged by the government to tighten US gun restrictions.

Who is Alex Jones?

Alexander Emerick Jones is a major conspiracy theorist and host of conservative, alt-right, and far-right radio shows in the United States. From Austin, Texas, he hosts The Alex Jones Show, which the Genesis Communications Network distributes across the United States and online.

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Jones’ website InfoWars, as well as his other websites NewsWars and PrisonPlanet, promote conspiracy theories and what is mostly called fake news. Jones often gives white nationalists a voice and support, giving Unite the Right participants and white supremacist Nick Fuentes a forum on his website Banned.Video and serving as an “entry point” to their philosophy.

Jones’ conspiracy theories claimed that the US government either withheld or overtly altered facts about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the 1969 Moon landing.

He claims that multiple governments and large corporations have worked together to build a “New World Order” through “manufactured economic crises, sophisticated surveillance tech and—above all—inside-job terror attacks that fuel exploitable hysteria.”

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Jones, a longstanding critic of Republican and Democratic foreign and security policy, supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and has continued to support him as a saviour from a suspected criminal bipartisan cabal dominating the federal government, despite disagreements with Trump on several policies, including airstrikes against the Assad regime.

Jones, an ardent supporter of Trump’s reelection, promoted bogus claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election and spoke at a rally in Lafayette Square Park in support of Trump on January 6, 2021, before the Trump supporters’ attack on the United States Capitol.

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Family

Jones and his ex-wife Kelly Jones have three children. In March 2015, the couple divorced. Due to her ex-husband’s actions Kelly requested sole or joint custody of their children in 2017. “He’s not a stable person,” she said, and “I’m concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress” (Adam Schiff).

His lawyer responded by saying “he’s playing a character” and referring to him as a “performance artist.” Jones denied playing a character on his show, calling it “the most bona fide, hard-core, real McCoy thing there is, and everybody knows it”; however, in court, Jones clarified that he generally agreed with his attorney’s statement, but disagreed with the media’s understanding of the term “performance artist.”

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Kelly has been granted the ability to choose where their children will live, although he retains visitation privileges. After Jones led a demonstration at the Capitol and was swamped by fans, a state district judge dismissed Kelly’s emergency plea to secure custody of their daughters for the next two weeks in April 2020.

Rex Jones, his son, has worked for InfoWars.

In 2017, Jones married Erika Wulff Jones and t hey have a one child together.