Alex Jones, the lead host of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars, announced Friday that he had tapped self-declared “New Right” leader Mike Cernovich to organize a grassroots protest against Google and other social media companies at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Jones’ home city of Austin.
Infowars and Google have continued to publicly duel over YouTube’s community guidelines and what right-wing media personalities claim is inconsistent enforcement of those guidelines by site moderators. Jones spent nearly all of last week criticizing YouTube for placing community guideline strikes on his videos accusing the Parkland high school shooting survivors calling for tougher gun laws of being “crisis actors,” which placed his channel one strike away from a permanent suspension. Jones argued that Infowars should get to keep its access to the millions of viewers it has gathered on YouTube. At one point while defending his account, Jones made the bizarre claim that he has successfully taken out “over 30” pedophiles.
Last week, YouTube also suspended the account of Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi, who has spent most of his time in recent months accusing various people of being satanic pedophiles, citing anonymous cryptic postings on 8Chan forum boards as proof. YouTube reinstated Corsi’s channel after backlash.
As the tensions between Infowars and YouTube continue to build, Jones has turned to Cernovich to organize a protest at the art and technology conference, which begins this Friday.
Last year, a group of activists led by pro-Trump troll and “Pizzagate” truther Jack Posobiec attempted to organize protests at Google offices around the United States after the company fired James Damore for circulating a memo criticizing Google’s diversity initiatives and arguing that biological traits make women less suited to be software engineers. The protests were called off, however, after Posobiec said organizers had received “credible Alt Left terrorist threats.” He wrote that outlets who reported on the protest inspired the threats with “malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers.”
This time around, Jones and Cernovich say they’re keeping plans for a protest against Google at South by Southwest under wraps. Jones said Cernovich “wants to coordinate this behind the scenes so that they don’t know when we’re coming, when you’re coming.”
“Watch this channel when the South by Southwest is going on for what we are going to do. It’s going to be legal and lawful, but they are so scared of us physically showing up because they only want cyber control,” Jones said. “They’re totally afraid of grassroots.”
Cernovich told Jones that it’s “life or death now” for conservatives in the public sphere.
“This isn’t the usual, ‘We’re under an attack, thank you for the support, share links.’ No, no, no. This is—we’re done, we’re off the internet, they’re banning us,” Cernovich said, before rehashing the same talking point about Christian persecution we wrote about last week.
He later added, “They want us in gulags, Alex. I don’t know what more to say. Death camps are coming.”
