A little over a week ago, hoaxer and InfoWars host Alex Jones gave a sworn testimony in which he blamed the media for giving him a “form of psychosis” that caused him to tell anybody who would listen that the shooting of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School did not happen. This week, it seems Jones will be making an appearance on Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive. Paul tweeted a video clip of Jones in the studio with him captioned, “tomorrow on impaulsive?” It sure looks like Jones will at the very least have a cameo on the show.
Does this pairing seem surprising? Not at all. Does it seem like it was concocted in some internet think tank by a team whose main objective was to make me scream internally? Yes. Logan Paul’s most recent appearances in headlines have been related to a mockumentary he made at a Flat Earther conference last year. The video makes it clear Paul himself does not actually believe the Earth isn’t round, but while shooting it, he spent time at the conference and even gave a keynote speech in which he lied to attendees and told them he was “coming out of the Flat Earth closet.” (A recent study found that YouTube was, unsurprisingly, something of a ground zero for radicalizing Flat Earthers.)
Jones is a guy whose hateful rhetoric and so-called conspiracy theory peddling has gotten him kicked off just about every platform you can think of, from Facebook to Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest. I don’t really care if he’s only on Paul’s podcast for the most fleeting of moments. Paul is making a choice to give him a platform when effectively everybody else has said enough. (After, mind you, months of hand-wringing.) It’s not terribly out-of-character behavior for the guy who kicked off 2018 by vlogging a dead body he found hanging from a tree in Japan’s “suicide forest.” It is, however, a little out of step with the redemption tour Paul put on after he was skewered on the world stage and begged everyone for a second chance. I’m curious what all the families from Parkland, Florida who appeared in a 22-minute YouTube documentary posted in 2018 by the other Paul brother, Jake, would have to say about Logan and Jones teaming up.
