Alex Jones is back on social media. Here are 5 times he demonized the LGBTQ+ community.

Elon Musk, the transphobic billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) recently reinstated the account of far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones was banned from Twitter in 2018 for “abusive behavior” and past violations of its content policies.

To justify Jones’s reinstatement, Musk held a livecast that included anti-LGBTQ+ misogynist influencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, far-right activist Laura Loomer, and rabidly transphobic presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. During the livecast, Musk asked Jones about “that Sandy Hook thing.”

That “thing,” as Musk called it, refers to Jones repeatedly using his social media and broadcast platforms to claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax. Jones claimed the 20 children slain in the shooting weren’t really dead and the grieving parents were just fake “crisis actors” used to justify gun control policies. As a result, the parents faced constant harassment and death threats from Jones’s followers. In October 2023, a court ordered Jones to pay $1.1 billion in defamation penalties to the parents. He has since tried to claim bankruptcy so he won’t have to pay them — something the court says he isn’t allowed to do.

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Jones told Musk on Sunday, “I had a very small operation and did not even understand how powerful I was,” even though his shows, InfoWars and The Alex Jones Show, had millions of monthly followers. “I’m really just a guy… I just take calls and interview guests and I play devil’s advocate,” Jones claimed.  “If that hurt people’s feelings, I apologize, but I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves.”

In addition to Jones’s “Sandy Hook thing,” he has long used his platforms to broadcast the voices of numerous anti-LGBTQ+ and antisemitic voices. Jones himself has also spread numerous anti-LGBTQ+ lies and conspiracy theories that, despite being obviously unhinged and ridiculous, have demonized queer people and resulted in real-world violence. Below are five times that he spouted anti-LGBTQ+ views.

After Jones and InfoWars were banned from Facebook in 2019, his show snuck back onto Facebook with three pages that made posts conflating LGBTQ+ rights and allies with pedophilia.

The NewsWars Facebook page posted a video entitled, “The Sordid History of Pedophilia and the Political Left” which claims that liberal, progressive, and Democratic political supporters secretly endorse pedophilia.

If this claim sounds familiar, it’s probably because it echoes the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Jones long espoused. Jones falsely claimed that a gay-owned Washington D.C. pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong Pizza, ran a secret child sex ring out of its nonexistent basement. The conspiracy convinced a gunman to shoot up the pizzeria in December 2016.

Jones denied personally running any of the Facebook pages but admitted that his companies were in charge of them.

In 2018, Jones said that the “trans movement” isn’t actually about transgender people: It’s part of a plan by the Deep State to give civil rights to cyborgs and humanoids – and force people to allow their neighbors to have sex with their cars.

“It’s not the people – men who want to be women or women who want to be men – it has nothing to do with that,” Jones said. “It has to do with something bigger.”

“The most protected class are going to be augmented humans — cyborgs, you name it. And you’re going to have humanoids, which again isn’t a man and a woman with the chromosomes splicing together,” Jones said before referencing a story about a child born with DNA from three parents.

He then launched into a rant about the expanded gender identity options available on Facebook and the LGBTQ+ community adding new letters to the end of the acronym to include other identities. At one point he even claimed there’s a letter for “people who want to have sex with cars. Want to know what that group’s called?”

For the record, wanting to have sex with a mechanical object is a paraphilia called “Mechanophilia.” It is not a sexual orientation and no one has ever tried to get it added to the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

“It’ll be like the national religion to go ‘L3Q943ABCQPBLV543Z92 dot dot dot 34Q5974,’” Jones added. “I mean, it’s just total mental illness, but it’s how you destroy a civilization.”

While Jones’ rant may merely sound silly and unhinged, it echoes right-wing transphobia dehumanizing trans people as mentally ill, sexually perverse, and a threat to society. It mirrors conservatives treating gender-affirming care like an “experimental” sci-fi horror (even though the methods of gender-affirming care have been used safely for decades).

In 2017, Jones accused liberal lesbians of wanting to physically abuse women.

“Most of the so-called liberal lesbians, they just wanna have the guy with the duck’s ass haircut and the James Dean outfit,” Jones said. “They want to be slapping girls around, and statistically it shows it,” he added ,though he did not specify which statistics show this.

“I’m not blaming all lesbians, but it shows that most of these butch lesbians, they want to be the guy smacking the hot chick around. They think that’s manly,” he continued.

He then said that women actually want to be domestic violence victims. He said that men, though, refuse to abuse their intimate partners — which is untrue — so straight women look for lesbians who are willing to hit them.

“A lot of the chicks, they like it. Because no man will do that to them, and I’m not saying it’s good if a man does that, but some women like it. If they can’t find a man to smack them around, well they found them a girl gonna do it real good, knock them upside their head.”

Jones went on to accuse these lesbians of eating their victims’ brains. “They want to strap you down and take a buzz saw and cut the top of your head off like a pumpkin and pull it off and get a little spoon and go, looking in the mirror, ‘I’m gonna eat your brain now!’”

He then did an impression of the brain-eating lesbians: “I’m gonna eat your cerebral cortex last! I’ve got power! I love Satan! And I’m gonna suck you dry and I’m gonna torture you to death. And you’re gonna follow my liberal orders!”

Yet again, while this rant may sound too silly to take seriously, he is essentially saying that butch, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming women are un-Godly (or anti-Christian) and a threat to straight women’s safety. These claims alone are enough to inspire some people into harassing or assaulting lesbians under the pretext of “protecting women” or “fighting enemies of God.”

In 2017, Jones interviewed former President Donald Trump’s political consultant Roger Stone. Stone expressed his angst with the national intelligence community and asked why people like then-National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster “all have shaved heads.”

Jones responded, “Because that’s part of being a leather daddy.”

Stone asked, “Is it some secret club or something that they’re in? I mean, it defies the odds of coincidence, that every one of these guys have the same kind of look. There it is. Extraordinary. By the way [McMaster’s] smirk at the end of this kind of gives the whole thing away.”

Jones added, “He looks like he could suck a golf ball through a garden hose,” and later said, “I’m not against people that have shaved heads, but there’s something going on there. I guess that’s ’cause they put their heads… in his butt or something.”

Here, Jones is invoking several anti-gay and authoritarian tropes at once. Foremost, anyone who opposes his preferred political leader must be intensely yet secretly homosexual and part of a shadowy secret society that threatens the current political order. Homosexuality here works as an insult because anyone who would dare to undermine a strongman authoritarian like Trump must be an unmasculine submissive pervert.

The idea that homosexuals oppose authoritarian strongmen leaders and seek to undermine the socio-political order is a conspiracy theory that dates at least as far back as Nazi Germany, a belief that resulted in the killing of Hitler’s gay officers in the “Night of Long Knives” as well as the detention and extermination of queer people as political dissidents and a threat to German health and social order.

When California revised its HIV criminalization law by lowering the penalty for potential HIV exposures or infections from a felony charge to a misdemeanor, Jones said the state should maintain its stronger criminal penalty because giving HIV to one another is “a culture now in the gay community.”

For his “proof,” Jones cited a widely debunked 2003 Rolling Stone article about so-called “bug chasing.” The article relied on questionable anecdotal data and reportedly misquoted one of its primary sources while claiming that many gay men want to contract HIV. But “bug chasing” is much more popular in the minds of people like Jones than in reality.

“I want to get into the psychology of the insane Democratic Party here, because when HIV goes from lowered numbers like it is to exploding in the next five years, in a few years, if we’re still here, as a planet, don’t have nuclear war, I will go back to this show and say here I am in 2017 saying within three to five years California will have a 200% increase in HIV,” Jones said. “And they will also complain and say we need single-payer, we need socialist health care, the reason we have HIV is because we don’t have free health care.”

“This is a religion. This is satanism, folks,” Jones added. “Because if they can get away with this, they can get away with anything. This is totally insane.”

Advocates have said that laws that severely criminalize HIV transmission have resulted in fewer people getting tested and disproportionately penalize African-American men for consensual sexual encounters.