He didn’t mean to turn you on
By David Futrelle
So the Daily Mail is reporting that two former Infowars employees have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing head Infowarrior Alex Jones and other staffers of harassment and discrimination, describing a workplace lousy with racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual harassment and way more shirtless Alex Jones than anyone should ever be subjected to.
Documents filed by ex-Infowarrior Rob Jacobson suggest that working for Jones as a Jewish person was, well, a lot like one might imagine it would be to work for Jones as a Jewish person.
According to the Daily Mail,
the controversial Infowars owner joked with staff who called … Jacobson ‘The Jewish Individual’, ‘The Resident Jew’ and shouted ‘Yacobson’ across the office, it’s claimed.
Jones allegedly continually bullied, ridiculed and humiliated Jacobson – who worked for Jones’ company Infowars for 13 years – before firing him last May.
Apparently working for Jones as a black woman isn’t much of a treat either.
Ex-Infowars production assistant Ashley Beckford says “the discrimination began almost immediately” after she started work there in 2016, the Daily Mail reports.
According to an EEOC complaint she too has filed: ‘I was subjected to different terms and conditions of employment, in comparison to my non-Black African-American peers, when it came to my salary/wages and benefits (travel), and in regards to my dress, including my hair style.
‘I also was subjected to harassment and racial slurs by Respondent’s management and some peer colleagues, as well as subjected to sexual harassment and a hostile, sexually offensive work environment.’
In a series of allegations, Beckford, who is African American, says she was ‘mocked’ for her skin tone, called a ‘coon’ by a senior manager, and denied promotions to match the salary of other coworkers, according to the complaint documents.
She also accuses Jones and several other supervisors and colleagues of ‘commonly leering at women in the office’, and making ‘sexual gestures and advances’. …
Beckford claimed that Jones groped her behind with his hand and commented to others, ‘Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?’ …
She claims he made ‘sexual advances’ towards her and made comments about her having a ‘good body that looked like I worked out a lot’ …
She added: ‘Alex often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering, with or without a shirt, at female guests and employees while creating a disgusting, hostile environment.’
Apparently, the Infowars offices are also full of dudes who love guns (and Donald Trump) a little too much.
Beckford … claims she was intimidated by the constant display of guns in the infowars’ office in Austin, Texas, which created an ‘extremely hostile work environment’ and alleges she was reprimanded if she ever questioned the actions of President Donald Trump.
For more of the sordid details, check out the documents posted by the Daily Mail.
Alex Jones, for his part, says it’s lies, all lies. “I mean nobody accuses me of stuff like that,” he told the Daily Mail. “No, no and in fact I’m not the type of person to say those kinds of things. So that’s why my feelings are hurt. Wow. That’s all I can say.”
Jones’ dad, who runs the Human Resources department at Infowars (!), wasn’t quite as definite in his denials, admitting to the Daily Mail that at least one of Jacobson’s accusations might sorta be true, maybe. “That might have been a case of 30 seconds of somebody giving him some crap, I can see that, it’s like a damn locker room,” he told the Daily Mail, choosing his words very uncarefully.
Presumably since this interview Alex has confiscated his dad’s phone.
Which was planned. The copilot was brainwashed to rig the air system with an aereosol borne paralytic agent based on spider venom on timed release, then not show up for the actual flight so that Kennedy would be alone at the controls with no one to act when he was paralysed.
Simple.
*Slams head repeatedly against the wall*
Yeah, I’m not sure if they just made up a person out of whole cloth or if they gave the name of the flight instructor and made it sound like he was on board and died. It’s been a while since I saw the DVD.
Maybe there were snakes?
I’m not trying to dogpile but having stayed with an abusive partner for over a decade and an abusive employer for over a decade (thankfully no intentional sexual harassment), I want to say that it’s not easy to get out of an abusive situation. It’s damn near impossible, really, with all the psychological tricks that abusers employ. I’m feeling pretty sick right now after reading some of this and I couldn’t get through all the comments so apologies if this already came up.
Since not everybody can see David’s Twitter sidebar, I’ll drop this right in the comments
https://twitter.com/RobertMaguire_/status/969286630833098752
This is the most hilarious case of old white people trying and failing to rap since the early 90’s when all the adults were trying to rap to reach the kids these days.
Well those CIA peeps are very clever; “intelligence’ is in the job title after all. So it’s understandable they covered their tracks. Just not well enough for an intrepid reporter like Mr Jones. Woodward and Bernstein got nothing on him.
I felt like something had really changed, around fifteen years ago, when I saw a Rice Krispies commercial feature rapping that sounded as though it had been written by people with an actual passing acquaintance with hip-hop, rather than ones who thought it meant reciting quatrains with an ABAB structure over a backbeat…..
@Kupo
I’m sorry you had to go through that. And you are so right. Even before getting out of an abusive situation, one has to recognize that it is abusive and then also recognize that one is being abused. It took me time and counseling to see the situation for what it was, and more time and counseling to admit even to myself that I was being abused. When it’s not physical abuse that leaves evidence, it can be easier to deny it’s happening and stay in the situation way too long. I don’t know Jacobson’s story, but I wish him strength through this process. It ain’t easy trying to hold an abuser to accounts.
@kupo and @laserqueen, I’m sorry and angry for you. I think even when you know, in practice it’s very very hard to change the dynamic let alone get out. No matter what you say, there’s always an answer that “proves” it’s actually all your fault plus you get endless anger directed at you which makes you feel you’d better just try to keep your head down (and then a lot of the time you still get berated for your silence anyway, so it’s not like that helps).
Come to think of it I’m sorry and angry for too many people.
I have read the posts but I still truly struggle with the concept that he chose to work their for 13 years. Supporting Infowars and taking that abuse. Media jobs may be hard to come by but my self respect and self-esteem could not take racist abuse for 13 months, let alone years!
I’ve quite jobs for substantially less.
@Stephanie, emotionally abusive relationships almost always involves deep feelings of guilt which make it really, really hard to leave. That’s the same here. It can be hard to understand, certainly, but it’s very much a real thing!
I thought these comments about Jacobson are little bit victim blaming too. people work for many reasons, we don’t know him, we don’t know his reasons or story or life. enough people said about abusive relationships and work already, so it is clear now, for everyone, I hope.
Must be nice to have the kind of privilege to be able to just walk out of a job.
@Scildfreja
There is emotional investment with a relationship though. This was a job?
@kupo
With no savings and no job to go to in the middle of the GFC it sure as hell didn’t feel like privilege.
But my mental health required it.
It’s also not merely that he took the abuse but in being an employee he enabled their work. It would be like me taking a job at The National Review, or providing online tech support for the ROK web page.
@Stephanie Tohill
There are emotional investments with jobs, too. I explained up thread that I was at an abusive employer for over a decade. Maybe you didn’t see it? I’m sure you’re not flat out dismissing the experiences of an abuse victim.
And yeah, being able to leave a job is privilege, even when it causes you hardship.
@Diego: I know we’ve moved on in main site topics but… how is the Roswell conspiracy white supremacist in nature? (The “ancient astronaut” stuff, yes, but…)
@Stephanie
Oof! Not a good look there…
I’ve been at my job about 14mo now. It’s caused me no shortage of depressive episodes. I’ve no intention of quitting
Isn’t, like, the entire point of privilege that it doesn’t feel like it to someone who has it?
And in the not unlikely nor uncommon scenario in which his mental health required he keep his job?
Really not getting how either Roswell or ancient astronaut theories are ‘white supremacist.’ They aren’t.
And you know there is nothing wrong with struggling to understand something having lacked any experience.
Oof, indeed. That last bit is definitely victim blaming.
I say this with no sarcasm what so ever-I’m very glad that you were able to walk away.
But having Kupo tell you it isn’t that simple and you digging in, doesn’t help the conversation. I myself am just now leaving an abusing relationship after 27 years. It’s a little more complicated than that. Job or relationship it can do a whammy on you, so if you could be a little kinder, that would be helpful. Sure, InfoWars is a hot mess but abuse is abuse and no one deserves that.
I just came home from a therapy session after discussing pretty much the same thing, and this is a little too much for me tonight.
Hugs, Myriad. 💜
Thanks, Kupo. Hugs back at cha.
Re Alex Jones’s constant shirtlessness on the so-called job, I have a theory (my conspiracy, allegedly): It’s all those “supplements” he peddles, those brainfight virility boosters with extra lead paint chips in every capsule. They cause him to Hulk out at unpredictable intervals, on or off the air, so the minions have taken to hiding his shirts in order to save him the embarrassment (and money) of having to go out and buy new ones every time that happens.
Either that, or he fancies himself some kind of ladies’ man.
Also, has anyone seen the so-called Before and After shots of himself that he uses to hawk that shit? The only difference that I can see between them is that in the Before photo, his skin’s a more or less normal shade of white-guy-with-a-slight-tan, while in the After, he’s as red as a boiled lobster.
And of course, he’s shirtless and sucking in his gut with a constipated look on his face.
(As to why his employees stuck it out in there for as long as they did with all that abuse, I second the “media jobs are hard to come by” explanation. Or in this case, media-adjacent jobs, since Alex Jones can’t do hard news for shit. Also, it beats what one makes flipping burgers, where there’s probably ALSO no shortage of racist or antisemitic abuse to be faced on the job.)
PS: Hugs to Kupo, Myriad, and anyone else who’s had to live with abusive relationships, whether at work or home. That shit’s not to be blamed on any victim, EVER.
@Stephanie Tohill,
Another reason for why someone might stay 13 years in a job they don’t like is money. As in, they have big bills to pay off, and thus don’t have enough financial savings to live off of while unemployed.
And unemployment insurance is not a guarantee in many states if you leave your job. The rules vary from state to state, but some states do have a rule that if you quit your job, that disqualifies you from getting unemployment. So big bills to pay + no real savings (because of said bills) + possibly months and months of waiting before some employer somewhere decides to even interview you + how many interviews you have to go through before someone hires you = putting up with shitty working conditions in order to survive. And that’s not even getting into needing GOOD references from your old job to put on your resume, and all that jazz…..
@nparker,
I don’t know about Roswell, but the racist implications of the ancient astronauts is the idea that there’s no way that the brown natives of Egypt and South America could’ve come up with the engineering ideas to move those huuuuuuge stone blocks on their own. That they’re too stupid to figure out on their own how, say, a lever works to lift a rock heavier than themselves, and adjust/apply that to stones weighing several tons and move them where they want them. That only Europeans were smart enough to figure those things out without aliens helping them along the way.
(Keep in mind that the reason that so many 19th century archeologists thought that things like telekinesis was used to build the Pyramids was because they never thought to ask any engineers – or even the local construction crews – how they might go about moving huge stones with minimal effort. They might have learned something interesting if they did so.)
yes, exactly! in fact, most people don’t have this privilage, especially people who live and work in counties without a reliably welfare system. we cant say why Jacobson stays in this job for this long, but there are plenty reasons why people stay in such jobs.
I am glad you are free from your abusive one, and I am glad for Jacobson too, it is good he speaks now about what happened to him, he doesn’t need to give any explanation. we should listen and believe! and fuck info wars!
now I will say my story, because this something which happens to me right now. I believe my girlfriend is in abusive job, her boss bullies her and harasses her and then next time says nice to her. she is confused and upset and yesterday I have to persuade her not to quit, even though I don’t want her to work there and it is against everything she also wants, but she can’t quit. if she quit then we will have very big problems with money. she doesnt have privilage to quit. we don’t have privilage that she will quit. and she worked in this job for more than 4 years already. I hope soon she will find new job, she made applications and we wait for news, but now she can’t leave and it is horrible but that is life and it is life for most people in this world I believe.
@nparker: As redsilkphoenix points out, the ancient astronauts stuff is generally chock-full of what TV Tropes politely calls Unfortunate Implications– in particular while Von Daniken wittered on about how the Pyramids in Egypt and South American *had* to have been built with alien help, he’s remarkably quiet about Stonehenge…
hugs for Myriad & Kupo 🌹
@Nequam,
While I’ve never read (that I recall, anyway) anything by Von Daniken, I have heard something akin to the ancient astronaut theory about Stonehenge. In fact, as recently as several years ago there was a group of primarily archeologists who went out to do another study of how Stonehenge was built, and who were throwing out theories involving telekinesis as ways of moving those rocks.
Meanwhile, the two engineers in the group managed to show that all the ancient builders really needed to move huge stone slabs several miles was lots of big logs, strong ropes, and a whole bunch of very strong people for pulling them along.
So yeah, even among the very ancient peoples of the world, where there’s a will (and enough available resources), there’s a way to do some really cool stuff. Something that modern peoples tend to forget more often than not….
Hello all. It’s really nice to see this place come back together. I have missed all of you and your insightfull comments.
Bannon: wears too many shirts.
Jones: wears not enough shirts.
Average them out, and you have… well, still a really gross human being, I suppose.
While it looks as though when the natives of Rapa Nui explained to anthropologists that the statues “walked” into place, they meant exactly that:
https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE
Many ancient astronaut theorists simply are under the impression that there is a singular progression of technologic innovation- they think that because we use a lot of technology to make things nowadays, then earlier people won’t possibly have made any technology that can do the same thing, as technology has one single ‘strand’ rather than many different t branches developing at different times.
It isn’t correct, but that explains a lot of it. While some of the theories or approaches may have slightly racial undertones (mainly subconscious) that isn’t the sole explanation. The point I make is that although some may have certain racial undertones, calling it ‘white supremacy’ is just really utterly inaccurate.
I can understand von Daniken not talking about Stonehenge, but I don’t think it is really comparable with the pyramids and such. Sure, Stonehenge looks amazing and all, but it doesn’t look in any way as complex to build without modern technology as the pyramids. I can see why the imagination wouldn’t run away with oneself about Stonehenge while doing so for the pyramids.
I think nparker’s right about the fallacy of the single strand of development, but I think there’s also an extent to which our society is very quick to overstate the effects of technology and understate the effects of social organisation.
The pyramids are a good example: the Egyptians didn’t have any amazing technology to build them with. They did, however, have the ability to conscript large amounts of labourers during the agricultural off-seasons and put them to work in an organised fashion. When you have the latter, you don’t really need the former.
This also holds true for the “why” of why they built the pyramids. Social reasons (to overawe neighbouring states, to impress the peasantry, to show the might of the ruling dynasty) often get discounted in favour of technological reasons (to guide spacecraft, to sharpen razor blades, to store grain).
Social organisation, however, leaves fewer impressive archeological artefacts than technology does. For people as obsessed with our material culture as 19th and 20th century westerners were, this meant that it was easy to overlook.
Isn’t there an obvious anti-white-supremacist interpretation of “ancient astronaut” theories? To wit, advanced aliens came along and decided the most promising candidate humans to teach to build a civilization were a bunch of brown and Asian ones in South America, Egypt, the Middle East, and Thailand, but as for those white barbarians to the north, they just shook their heads (if they had heads) and said “nuh-uh, waste of effort”. 🙂
@ Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Yes, I think that’s a good point.
Ancient astronaut theories may posit alien assistance as the reason for various advanced-seeming historical feats, but it isn’t the aliens who do the work in them, it is various non-white races who do the work, and are indicated to be so intelligent that they can understand alien technology, and as you said, it would mean aliens chose non-white races to give their secret to, which would be a pretty big compliment.
The premise behind alien technology theories is that the people coming up with them think the people could not possibly have come up with the technology to build these wonders themselves, so they find it *more plausible* that an alien race visited us from *probably tens of thousands of light years away* in order to teach humans how to build these wonders. They have so little faith in the non-white civilizations that they think these feats *completely* out of the realm of possibility for them despite the clear evidence they actually built these wonders, so they make up a theory based on precisely zero evidence rather than trust the evidence that’s there. But they have no trouble in grasping the advancements in technology the West has made.
That’s white supremacy.
Plus, a lot of the ancient astronaut believers think that the reason we evolved from our ape ancestors is that the aliens boosted some of those apes in order to make us intelligent enough to mine gold them. Because apparently when super advanced cultures run out of gold in their neck of the woods, mining it with machines on alien planets or creating a synthetic analogue is less preferable than genetically engineering and enslaving a race of intelligent beings. Because… reasons? Anyway, this would suggest that aliens were visiting civilizations because they saw the people in those civilizations as ideal slaves. So the whole brown and black people = slaves thing is another layer to the white supremacy thing.
I doubt for most of these people the white supremacy is intentional, but it’s definitely there.
The whole “advanced civilisations travel around in awesome space craft, finding other planets to get the resources their society badly needs” trope is more than a little absurd. The physics of it really do not work out.
(I’m happy to rant about it if anyone is interested.)
@EJ
Depends how you define resources, doesn’t it. 😛
I can see a species travelling the universe (physics and lifespans permitting) looking for life and intelligence. For when you have both life and intelligence – you have creativity. Which is a rare resource by most definitions.
Of course, there’s probably physical resources we don’t have clue one about yet, so can’t judge on the rarity of those. For all we know, we’re sitting on the biggest stockpile of anti gravity precursor in the known universe (and are probably doing something dumb with it like making chewing gum) 😛
I’ve been sometimes thinking about this. There’s been a huge number of ancient societies (most of them preliterate) and some (relatively few) of them left monuments that seem extraordinary in the light of the technological and economic resources of those societies.
I mean, it’s hard to believe that Americans were able to send people to the Moon and back with 20th century technology. If they’d built a stone monument with those resources instead, it’d overshadow the pyramids.
@Bina and Valentin
Thank you. The hugs are appreciated.
The takeaway from this article is that bodyshaming and objectifying based on appearance or clothing choices is ok, when it’s a white male victim when it’s lefty feminists doing it. It’s one standard of behavior for them but a different one for everybody else I guess.
Oh dear.
It’s like somebody can’t tell the difference between an office and a strip club.
Taking your clothes off as a form of sexual harassment is a clothing choice now? Cuz that’s the only criticism of clothing choice I see. I’m not sure where the body shaming is either.
As gotchas go, that wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen.
@Micky
Uhm… where are we applauding a female boss of color for strutting topless thru her workplace despite the complaints of her team? Cos I didn’t see that part of the discussion…