Alex Jones is back to hocking conspiracies, and this time his attention is toward the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—which, according to the notoriously factless conspiracy theorist, was a ploy by the Democratic establishment to nix the presumptive GOP presidential candidate from the race.
“Biden’s puppet masters ran the attack on Trump and they will do it again,” Jones wrote Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. “The secret service now admits the assassin was on the roof for 26 minutes. The secret service has a long history of deliberate stand downs. Think Dallas Texas 1963 and go from there …”
There is little to no evidence that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was on the rooftop for 26 minutes—or that the Secret Service had historically “deliberately” stood down in order to allow a political operative to get shot, though Jones’s callback to Dallas in 1963 suggests that he believes the Secret Service allowed President John F. Kennedy to be assassinated.
So far, little is understood about Crooks or his motives, save that he was a 20-year-old white male from Bethel, Pennsylvania. Former classmates described him as a bullied “loner” and “outcast” with a penchant for wearing military and hunting clothes, and who was by all measures “definitely conservative.” The FBI announced on Monday that forensic experts with the agency had infiltrated Crooks’s cell phone and were examining his digital footprint, though they have not yet released their findings.
Speaking with CNN on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded that Crooks never should have reached that vantage point on a warehouse roof, just 430 feet away from the former president.
“We are speaking of a failure,” Mayorkas told CNN. “We are going to analyze through an independent review how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle described the error as “unacceptable” in an interview with ABC News, noting that the “buck stops with me.”
Jones has lost practically everything to his incessant need for the spotlight. In 2017, the InfoWars host lost primary custody of his children in a case that pinned him as a “cult leader” on an online conspiracy network. In 2022, Jones lost a defamation case brought by the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, who argued that Jones had caused them irreparable harm by baselessly claiming to his far-right followers the shooting was a “hoax.” That case cost the right-wing conspiracy theorist $1.5 billion and forced Jones into bankruptcy months later. He has since lost his stake in his media company, Free Speech Systems, and has been court-ordered to liquidate all of his assets in order to cover the tremendous damages.
