My armchair assessment is he loves money and he found a herd of morons that is willing to throw millions at him if he behaves like a maniac and says outlandish things. He basically performs like any religious huckster, knowingly feeding people lies for dollar bills. Here he is on JRE walking back his Sandy-Hook-being-fake-claims and he presents as a perfectly reasonable, informed dude: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QzpXMbM-kos

Your armchair assessment is quite obviously spot-on. I hope the forthcoming lawsuits fine him into oblivion.

I don’t really know why it’s so hard to pinpoint what Alex Jones is or does what he does.

He’s a professional troll, as in says things he doesn’t necessarily believe in himself but fit whatever public brand he is trying to sell because it brings him attention which in turn makes him money.

Sometimes it seems like we have all these words to describe people exactly like him aka troll, LARPer, astroturfer, and yet for whatever reason when we actually see someone doing any of these things we somehow think he’s actually crazy and believes all these conspiratorial things when the most likely explanation is that it’s all just a bit.

> whoever put the guy on air

He put himself on the air, he's the creator of InfoWars. I'm sure other people are involved, but ultimately he's still the one to point the finger at.

I suppose I thought the network would have the final say, and they should be held accountable for the content they permit on their channels. Then again, I'm not sure how much of this occurred online in a setting that can't really be moderated. I watched an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience with him on YouTube many years ago (it was awful), and I don't think that could effectively be moderated by anyone. That's a hard problem.

I wasn't trying to say Jones shouldn't be accountable. Even if he isn't a sociopath, what he did was inexcusable. I simply meant to say he didn't work independently, and I'm surprised/concerned he wasn't shut down much sooner.

I am not any kind of medical professional, but I would categorize him as a sociopath.

When pressed in court, he admits that he doesn't really believe anything he is saying. He just doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as he keeps making money.

I used to listen to Jones a lot back around 2010 and I feel very confident that Jones fully believed it was a staged event, more surprising to me is that he corrected his mistake many times on air, on video and in person many years before he was sued.

I said this in another comment as I hope his platform disappears, but I don't think justice is being served here.

He said in court he does not believe it, so if your assessment is correct he committed yet another act of perjury.