Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
In a more-than-usually bizarre segment on Tuesday, Infowars’ Alex Jones hosted Isaac Kappy, a minor actor whose recent spate of Periscope and YouTube videos accusing prominent Hollywood figures of pedophilia have made waves in the conspiracy-minded community.
Liberally utilizing the hashtag #QAnon, which is affiliated with a sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory, Kappy has spread baseless accusations that actors including Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Seth Green are pedophiles. This slate of denunciations proved so popular that for a brief time this week, Kappy’s videos and other QAnon-affiliated broadcasts dominated the YouTube search results for the celebrities. During a segment on the July 31 edition of The Alex Jones Show, Jones set the stage for Kappy to spread his baseless recrimination of Hollywood figures, repeatedly asking leading questions about “Aleister Crowley” rituals and “Hollywood parties.”
Jones -- who has devoted airtime to amplifying QAnon theories on multiple shows -- sparred with Kappy in a series of bizarre segments. Kappy claimed that actor Seth Green is sexually interested in children, based in part on an alleged dinner in which Green, the creator of the show Robot Chicken, told him, “We need to have a talk about chicken.”
Kappy claimed “chicken” is “a pedophile code word for very young child”; Jones responded incredulously, repeatedly asking whether Green and other Hollywood figures had subjected Kappy to practical-joke “Sacha Baron Cohen”-style tactics used to dupe celebrities and politicians. Kappy insisted that he had seen evidence of a broad child-sex ring that pervaded Hollywood, but he was unable to provide substantiating evidence, despite naming Green and his wife directly.
However, Jones, who is being sued in a defamation lawsuit brought by parents of two children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, asked Kappy to restrain himself and avoid “ getting into names.” At one point, Kappy insisted Jones was “gaslighting” him by asking him to substantiate his claims.
The grim sparring was a strange sideshow in the business of broadcasting conspiracy theories to a huge audience, one that Kappy has just entered via unhinged Periscope streams. The notion that broadly liberal segments of society, such as Hollywood and the media, are engaged in baroque cover-ups of pedophilia is a cornerstone of the QAnon conspiracy theory -- which holds that President Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to kneecap members of the “deep state” and crack down on pedophilia rings connected to powerful politicians and liberal celebrities. The claim has flourished for months in online message boards, despite just recently coming to mainstream attention. The recklessness of Kappy’s claims is a powerful illustration of just how far some conspiracy theorists are willing to go in pursuit of infamy -- and a chilling portent of the lengths to which conspiracy theory adherents might be willing to go to stop the horrors they imagine.