Howdy!
I’m the publisher at The Barbed Wire.
If you’re new to our site, we’re a next-generation digital media property absolutely obsessed with all-things Texas. If you’re returning after reading our kick-ass coverage of tiny lizards, Russian wrestlers, video games, and civil rights, we’re glad to have you back. We’d like your help to make some mischief by buying Infowars and using it for our absurd-joke-filled progressive journalism purposes.
Jones has said he hopes “patriots,” will buy the company, keeping him employed and on the air. What if we do literally anything else with it? We’re not the first to joke about this. But we’re also dead serious, and we’d love some co-conspirators.
First, I’d like to share a couple quick memories with you.
It’s 1998. I’m a 19-year-old in my second semester at the University of Texas at Austin. My idiot roommates and I regularly smuggle beer into the dorm, play Mortal Kombat until 2 a.m. (I earned that 2.9 GPA my freshman year), and frequently end our nights watching a ranting mad-man on local cable access scream through the TV about fluoride in the water — and sometimes the Branch Davidians. Back then, Alex Jones seemed harmless. Almost funny.
Next, it’s December 2012. I’m in the car with a colleague, headed to Houston from Austin. We’re on our way to do some advising for Sylvia Garcia, a candidate for state senate who later becomes a congresswoman. I’ve got little kids at home. My colleague has children of her own. We hear the news of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting come on the radio shortly after we get on I-10. We spend the next hour holding back tears, mostly speechless. Twenty children are dead, and there aren’t words yet to describe the new era of gun violence, in which even 6-year-olds learning how to sound out words might die in a pool of blood. Alex Jones would tell his audience that the deaths of these children were staged.
By November 2016, Infowars is being promoted by bots connected to the Russian government. Using Alex Jones’ words, they’re sowing division, decreasing faith in American democracy, and whipping up support for President Trump based on conspiracy theories. After the election, Austin Mayor Steve Adler and City Councilman Greg Casar, along with other community leaders, gather in a park to send a message to local immigrants: “We’ve got your back, and we will fight to protect you.” A chud with a fashy haircut, a mic, and a cameraman show up from Infowars. They put their camera and mic millimeters from peaceful protestors faces, antagonizing and intimidating them. Trying to provoke a fight. I approach some Austin police officers and say, “Hey man, the Infowars guys are gonna start a fight over there. They are trying to get someone to hit them.” The cops shrug and tell me there’s nothing they can do.
Later, an Infowars video editor admits to lying in their “reporting,” ostensibly “to make people click.” At least one of those pieces received shout outs from President Trump at his rallies. In the years before and since, Alex Jones has been a wart, a toxic pollutant, a barreling asteroid headed towards a peaceful meadow for essentially the entirety of my adult life. I’m fucking sick of it.
If you heard a man on a street corner yelling the things Alex Jones says on a regular basis, you’d cross to the other side. But instead of screaming on the street, Alex Jones stands atop an empire of dirt — lies, paranoia, ruined lives, broken families, Holocaust denialism, conspiracy theories, $165 million dollars in supplement sales, and of course, the incalculable pain of the families from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He’s stormed the halls of the Texas Capitol (I saw it; I was there) and had the ear of the former president. He’s the reason someone desecrated a young child’s grave. The damage he has done is immeasurable. (Though, to the families from Sandy Hook, it measured at least $1.5 billion.)
This week, news broke that Infowars — the bile-production valve in the rotten gut that is Jones’ media empire — is up for sale. The proceeds will be used to help pay the Sandy Hook families’ claims against him. As senior editor Brian Gaar wrote: “Stuff up on the block includes the Infowars website and social media accounts, the company’s broadcasting equipment, along with all its product trademarks, as well as the inventory owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.”
In case anyone was unclear, this is only happening because for years, Jones spread lies about 20 dead first graders and six dead educators. In turn, his followers confronted grieving parents in person, told them that the shooting was fake and that their dead kids never existed, and even threatened to dig up a child’s grave (not the desecrated one — another one). When people believe him, sometimes they take up arms.
The Barbed Wire wants to buy Infowars, and we want you to help us do it.
Make a contribution today, and we’ll use every penny we raise as a part of this campaign to bid on Infowars at auction. At its peak, the site had 10 million visitors per month. If we win, we will use ownership of this powerful domain to unwarp the broken minds of friends and loved ones, excise damaging lies from history, and make a fuckton of mischief with one of the most effective tools on earth: Investigative journalism. We’d like to keep shining a light on dis- and misinformation, bring some measure of justice to those who deserve it, and uncover more misconduct. If we don’t raise enough or win the auction, we’ll still use it for mockery and progressive journalism — in that event, at the suggestion of our editor-in-chief, we promise whatever we raise will be earmarked for exclusive reporting on far right extremism and disinformation in Texas.
Journalism is the first draft of history, and we’d like to make sure future generations know the tragedies on Sept. 11, 2001 and at the 2013 Boston Marathon weren’t “false flags” — for the blessedly unaware, that’s a term used by conspiracy theorists to suggest sinister government forces were secretly behind our nation’s worst terrorist attacks.
The world can be a shitty place these days. Alex Jones has helped make it that way. Together, we can do something about it. I hope you’ll join us.