The InfoWars Supplements Scam: Pull the Plug on Blowhard Pill Shills
I wish I could say there was universal celebration after InfoWars founder Alex Jones was hit with nearly a billion dollars in judgments for his role in defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting in 2012. But it wasn’t universal. The right wing misinformation mafia made some well-deserved justice for horrific behavior sound like persecution.
For those of you who might not remember, twenty children, most between the ages of six and seven along with six adults were killed in classrooms, as a gunman fired 156 rounds from semi-automatic weapons.
An international outcry over the availability of the types of weapons used was met with a strong pushback from so-called gun rights groups. The president of the National Rifle association called for congress to fund a law enforcement presence in schools rather than consider limitations on the selling of semi-automatic weapons.
Within hours of the shooting, Jones was broadcasting his take on the slaughter, namely that it was staged as a pretext for confiscating guns. Grieving parents were described as “crisis actors,” a term that’s becoming central to conspiracy theories about all kinds of events.
The lies spread by Jones led to harassment and threats by conspiracy theorists, who stalked relatives and survivors, saying they’d faked the children’s deaths.
Parents of the children have taken both legal and political action over the past decade. Arms manufacturer Remington settled for $73 million earlier this year following the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an appeal.
InfoWars and Jones have been shown to be reckless purveyors of conspiracy theories, who’ve leveraged a constant stream of lies into a lucrative platform for selling nutritional supplements.
In 2018, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Twitter all removed Jones from their platforms, saying he violated their policies against abusive and harmful content. His products are still available on Amazon and Ebay.
Faced with lawsuits based on claims of defamation, he generally refused to cooperate with the courts in discovery. Prior to this most recent damage award, he had been assessed with a total of $126,000 in fines for contempt of court.
As it became obvious that lawsuits were headed for trial, Infowars and its parent company Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy protection. Given that Jones personally withdrew $62 million in 2021, it’s widely suspected that he’s attempting to hide assets that would be seized.
It’s estimated that Jones’ net worth is somewhere north of $262 million and sales of various products advertised on his program generate tens of millions annually. He claims to be broke even as he’s begging for money and/or supplement sales on his program.
The conspiracy theorist raked in $165 million from the Infowars store over three years beginning in September 2015, all while begging his supporters to help him stay financially solvent, according to records obtained by Huff Post.
For instance, on Nov. 18, 2016, Jones aired a segment titled “Alex Jones’ Final Statement on Sandy Hook” in which he said he has “watched a lot of soap operas, and I’ve seen actors before. And I know when I’m watching a movie and when I’m watching something real.”
The Infowars store made just over $100,000 that day.
About five months later, on April 22, 2017, Jones published a new video on Infowars titled “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed.” The store made $90,000.
What’s amazing about this verdict and the testimony made public in recent weeks are the public figures trying to make this into a First Amendment case, or worse, repeating Jones’ conspiracy claptrap about globalists persecuting him.
Vance is running for Senate in Ohio.
If there was a scintilla of truth to any of the conspiracist claims surrounding Sandy Hook, one would think that a decade later at least one individual would have come forward to refute the official version of what happened. I’m sure the National Enquirer or Fox News would have paid handsomely for such a story.
Not telling the truth –or, as I like to call it, lying– provides the economic foundation for fringe movements. While selling “miracle” supplements has long been associated with right wing causes, you don’t have to look very far to find these products being pitched by all kinds of hustlers.
Alex Jones products, according to an article on Quartz, contain many of the ingredients as those pitched by Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness blog, Goop. The Infowars host does go a little further than “wink, wink, smile” in pitching products, as proven by the cease and desist order from NY Attorney General Letita James ordering him to stop selling toothpaste, dietary supplements, creams, and several other products as treatments to prevent and cure coronavirus.
None-the-less, selling supplements is a popular income source for righty propagandists as
Paul Krugman pointed out in the New York Times:
Snake oil peddlers, clearly, find consumers of right-wing news and punditry a valuable market for their wares. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find many right-leaning Americans ready to see vaccination as a liberal plot and turn to dubious alternatives — although, again, I didn’t see livestock dewormer coming.
The interesting question, however, is to what extent the connection between right-wing politics and snake oil marketing has shaped the political landscape.
Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.
The point of this essay is to urge readers to look beyond the obvious blowhard blathering of a character like Jones. He’s a horrible human being and deserves to be hunted down by process servers for the rest of his life.
The thing here is to realize that lying is profitable, and the power of the quasi-pharmaceutical industry to block oversight is at the heart of the right wing ecosystem, in addition to everyday scam artists.
The American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics reporting on supplements reveals the dangers and downsides of an industry with $40 billion in sales of over 80,000 products used by as many as 4 in 5 people in the U.S.
(Of course, you can also point to the woeful inadequacy of our private insurance-driven healthcare rationing as an underlying reason for these sales, and the AMA’s role in preserving this system is indisputable.)
Congress is considering legislation providing the FDA with better and clearer authority to regulate dietary supplement products and protect public health. When the time comes for a vote, legislative leadership dominated by right wing extremists will make sure it goes nowhere. This is just another reason why your vote in the upcoming general election is important.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com