Conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones on Monday defended his sobbing Saturday rant in which he claimed he was being “targeted for abuse” with the imminent shutdown of his media company.
During the InfoWars live taping on Monday, Jones insisted his Saturday meltdown was not a “publicity stunt” but a genuine cry of anger and frustration.
“The art was taken off the walls, employees took their stuff home, there were tears,” Jones said. He was considerably more subdued than in Saturday’s emergency session, in which he howled about supposed “Deep State” actors shutting down his operation and begged listeners to buy his supplements to support him.
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Jones’ Monday comments came in reaction to an emergency motion filed Sunday by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, who asked a Texas bankruptcy court judge to liquidate Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, instead of allowing Jones to reorganize it. The families are seeking $1.5 billion in damages from Jones over his false claims that the 2012 elementary school shooting was a hoax.
In dour tones on Monday, Jones rambled about his money woes and claimed he was running out of options to save his platform.
“I’m out of bullets,” he said—a peculiar choice of words, given his company is being shuttered by the families of gun violence victims. “I’m out of money, and my dad’s out of money, and he would help me,” Jones lamented. “I’m out of options, and that’s where we are.”
However, Jones has been dubbed a serial exaggerator and “performance artist” by his own lawyers in the past. Randall Wilhite, who represented Jones when his ex-wife Kelly Jones sued to get custody of their children, said at a pretrial hearing that the media personality was just “playing a character” on his show.
According to recent bankruptcy filing statements, Jones holds about $9 million in personal assets, the Associated Press reported.
Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families of Sandy Hook victims who sued him, claiming that they were subject to unnecessary, traumatizing, and persistent harassment by Jones’ followers who readily took up the junk hoax theory.
