Paul Joseph Watson, a right-wing YouTube creator and editor-at-large at the prolific conspiracy theory outlet Infowars, wants you to forget the last decade of his career and to now believe he doesn’t like conspiracy theories.
In an interview uploaded yesterday to Dennis Prager’s digital media outlet PragerU, Watson joined conservative commentator Candace Owens on her podcast to discuss issues of social media moderation as interpreted through the right-wing lens that defines it as “censorship.” Watson was banned from Facebook earlier this year.
During the interview, Watson took issue with how the media has characterized the content he produces, often identifying him as a conspiracy theorist and sympathetic to the alt-right. Watson rejected being considered alt-right, since he said he does not believe in the pursuit of a white ethnostate, and similarly rejected being called a conspiracy theorist.
“I hate conspiracy theories. I think most of them are really dumb,” Watson said.
Owens chimed in that she doesn’t watch CNN because it’s a “conspiracy theorist network.” It’s worth noting that Owens got her start in right-wing media thanks in part to an in-studio appearance she made on Alex Jones’ Infowars show while she still operated under the moniker “Red Pill Black.”
Watson said, “I was a conspiracy theorist when I was a kid, like 15 years ago. That’s where I came from, so I know how those ideas—you take disparate bits of information and fuse them together to create a conspiracy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some conspiracies. But I know how they’re created and I know mentally how people are lulled into believing them.”
After making his claim, Watson maintained his newfound anti-conspiracy theory position for about 10 minutes. Then, Watson and Owens theorized that tech companies were banning right-wing figures from their platforms because they are involved in a conspiracy to silence political dissidents and enforce homogeneous political thought.
Watson appeared in-studio on Infowars in March to talk about a new project he was working on to “generate the next generation of YouTubers, of young political commentators.”
