Watch The Opposition Shout Down Alex Jones—or Was It a Crisis Actor?

When The Opposition first launched last fall, one of its chief inspirations was Alex Jones—the Infowars radio host known for hawking supplements and spreading conspiracy theories about mass tragedies, including the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Jordan Klepper’s farcical, Colbert Report-like character would be similarly suspicious and dogmatic. Jones himself reacted to Klepper’s mockery before the show even premiered—and on Thursday, at long last, the late-night show was able to confront its inspiration face to face. The result? A paranoia-fueled shouting match that included “crisis-actor” accusations, repeated allusions to Jeff Bezos, and, of course, a sales pitch for supplements.

In the past couple months, Jones and Infowars have been hit with two major defamation lawsuits—one from Marcel Fontaine, whom the radio host accused of being the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooter, despite the fact he lives in Massachusetts and has never been to Florida, and the other from Brennan Gilmore, whom Jones called a “deep state shill” after he recorded the vehicular attack that killed Heather Heyer during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. As far as The Opposition correspondent Kobi Libii is concerned, however, the word “defendant” is simply “legal jargon for victim”—and so he decided to pay Jones’s press conference in Washington, D.C. a solidarity visit.

When Libii arrived, however, he barely cleared the door before security escorted him out—which was his first sign that something was amiss. After all, as the comedian noted, “Alex Jones believes in a free, independent media. This just doesn’t sound like him. He wouldn't do that. I mean, it's` almost like it’s not. . . him.”

Could it be that this guy was actually a crisis actor playing Alex Jones in some kind of false flag operation? After all, he might have sounded like Jones, “but something's just not right—I mean, he’s hardly sweating. At all.”

And so, in the name of truth, Libii confronted the “crisis actor.” After about thirty seconds, that effort devolved into a shouting match in which Libii yelled and Jones used. . . well, his usual volume of voice. “Sir, you sound scripted,” Libii said as he managed to spout off the same talking points as Jones in real time. And when Jones poured a bottle of supplements over his head? “They taste like huckster.”

The extremely meta gambit was a perfect example of why The Opposition continues to be a fascinating entry in the admittedly crowded late-night field. With Stephen Colbert no longer playing his conservative alter-ego at a time when the alt-right is thriving and media consumption is more fragmented than ever, Klepper and his team have continued to find new ways to, as Klepper once put it to V.F., “play in that crazy.”

It was only after the confrontation that Libii found out that he had not been speaking with a crisis actor, but in fact the real Alex Jones—which resulted in a bit of an existential crisis as he asked himself, “What have I done?!”

“Only a monster would take a man going through a real hard time and accuse him of lying and being an actor,” Libii continued. “What kind of turgid piece of shit am I—and anyone who would do that? Thank God I'm the only example of this I can think of.”

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