Last Thursday, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville attacked “Sharia law,” claimed the Biden administration was trying to “build an army” of undocumented immigrants, and called Democratic politicians “absolutely mentally retarded” over the course of a lengthy interview on The Alex Jones Show.
The program’s host, Texan conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, asked Tuberville about Jones’ belief that liberal elites plan to “kick off a race war” which the films Civil War and One Battle After Another were meant to inspire, and about Trump’s recent decisions to send federal troops into cities with Democratic mayors.
“I mean, [Trump] is the CEO of this country, and he’s here to help everybody,” Tuberville said at one point when Jones brought up plans within the Trump administration to invoke the Insurrection Act as justification for sending active duty military into American cities. The two also spent much of the interview talking about Muslim communities in and immigration to America, which Jones likened to “over a thousand invasions for 600 years by Muslims into Europe.”
Jones began to wind the interview down by again asking Tuberville about elites’ supposed plans to start a race war.
“They’re going to try to—they’ve said the Podesta plan—get a race war going,” Jones remarked. “The great news is the average Hispanic or Black folks aren’t buying into this, but I’m still very concerned. Closing comment on that, sir?”
“You can’t solve a problem unless you know the problem, and people refuse to believe what’s going on because they don’t see a lot of it,” the senator responded.
Former Alabama Senator Doug Jones criticized Tuberville’s appearance on The Alex Jones Show at an event hosted by the University of Alabama College Democrats on Wednesday night.
“I think the people of Alabama ought to be ashamed of their United States senator,” he said. “[Alex Jones] is a racist, he’s antisemitic, and when a U.S. senator from Alabama, like Tuberville, goes on that show, he is just feeding that beast.”
“[Tuberville] is acknowledging that he agrees with [Alex Jones], that he is promoting that same kind of racism, misogyny, you name it,” Doug Jones continued. “The people of Alabama ought to remember that, and I guarantee you that that performance will come back, because Alex Jones is a despicable person and personality.”
Alex Jones is perhaps most well known outside of conspiracist, right-wing circles for his coverage of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, which has left him deeply in debt to the families courts have ruled he defamed.
The day of the shooting, he repeatedly implied and outright stated that the massacre of 26 people, including 20 children, had been “staged” by the government to justify taking people’s firearms. He also told his audience that Robbie Parker, whose daughter was killed in the shooting, had looked like he was “about to accept an Oscar” at a press conference.
A decade later, Parker testified in a defamation suit against Jones that it “was almost like I knew when Alex Jones said something because we would get a huge wave of stuff” from people who still believed that the shooting was a hoax. He described having to take down his daughter’s memorial page on Facebook because of online harassment and feeling like he “couldn’t protect Emilie’s name, or her memory anymore.”
Jones was found liable by default in the defamation suit due to “willful noncompliance,” and was ordered to pay $1.4 billion in damages to the affected families. The Supreme Court denied his most recent appeal of that judgment on Tuesday.
Jones and his company InfoWars have also been widely criticized for spreading antisemitism. Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic livestreamer who frequently praises Adolf Hitler and spreads racist vitriol, is a somewhat frequent guest on The Alex Jones Show.
In recent years, Alex Jones has often used the phrase “Jewish mafia” to describe some of the Jewish individuals he frequently attacks on his show, like Rahm Emanuel and George Soros. “They run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you,” he said in one October 2016 episode.
Additionally, when Jones referred to the “Jewish mafia” more recently in 2022, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia created the ADL in 1913 when a pedophile raped and killed a little girl, and they didn’t like the fact that he got in trouble, so they said, ‘We’re founding this organization to do this.’” The ADL was founded after a Jewish man, Leo Frank, was arrested in Georgia in 1913.
Modern researchers overwhelmingly agree that Frank was innocent. Even at the time, the governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s sentence from the death penalty to life in prison due to the governor’s personal doubts about the case. Shortly after receiving that commutation, Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched.
“Alex Jones believes that God gave him prophetic visions as a child to prepare him for his destiny of fighting against the literal devil, which he believes he is currently doing,” Dan Friesen told APR. Friesen is a co-host of the Alex Jones focused podcast Knowledge Fight, which has an over one thousand episode backlog covering the beliefs of Jones and other conspiracy theorists.
“His show consists of him making things up, misinterpreting primary sources, yelling about tweets, and pretending that things he read in sci-fi novels as a child are real, in service of creating an illusion of political conspiracy to mask what he’s really promoting, which is white nationalism and Christian Identity,” Friesen stated.
Mallory Jaspers, Tuberville’s communications director, did not answer any of the detailed questions about the senator’s appearance on The Alex Jones Show that APR provided.
Instead, in an emailed reply, she called APR’s request for comment “one of the most ridiculous inquiries I have ever received.”
“Sen. Tuberville interviewed with Alex last week—and he also regularly speaks with the likes of Manu Raju from CNN,” she wrote. “Sen. Tuberville spent 40 years in coaching and the past 5 years in the Senate where he has done thousands of interviews.”
“Surely APR does not believe he should be held accountable for every word anyone he has interviewed with has ever said?” Jaspers added. “If that’s true, APR should be held to the same standard.”
Sen. Tuberville is not the first notable Republican politician to appear on one of Jones’ radio broadcasts. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, has been a guest on the program several times in recent years. And Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, and President Donald Trump both made appearances during the 2016 election season.
“I feel like the way that more members of Congress are fine appearing with Alex Jones reflects two shifting dynamics,” Friesen opined. “The first is that the media landscape is changing to the point where there aren’t really any standards, and that serves the interests of those in power.” He pointed to the ties of Trump’s chosen FBI director, Kash Patel, to the fringe conspiracy theory QAnon as evidence of this first dynamic.
“The second is that Trump’s second term has forced a lot of people like Alex to drop their charade of being threatening to power,” he noted. “As they have repeatedly violated their own principles in order to maintain a proximity to the power held by the Trump administration, they have essentially defanged themselves as potentially dangerous figures for right-wing politicians to do interviews with.”
