Alex Jones Falls for Decades-Old College Bathroom Prank

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was caught by a prank devised by college students that has been floating around online for at least two decades.

Jones, the founder of InfoWars, has rarely shied from incredulity. Despite being ordered to pay $1.5 billion for propagating damaging and false stories, Jones has continued to share baseless claims and ideas via InfoWars and on social media.

However, the controversial host who continues to present himself as a salve of honesty, managed to fall for a juvenile joke shared among students and teens since at least the mid-2000s.

On Monday, Jones reposted a notice purportedly sent by the University of Waterloo advising students against onanism in communal washrooms.

The notice said these acts had caused "thousands of dollars" in damage, and that should it continue, analysis would be carried out to determine those responsible.

Jones shared the notice, first circulated by fellow conspiracy theorist Chuck Callesto, on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday with the message: "Clown world," a term associated with the alt-right, expressing distaste toward the actions or policies of liberal and progressive societies.

However, the notice has been circulating in online forums since at least the early 2000s, and is a repeatedly used prank among college students.

A search for the text in the notice Jones shared leads to a Reddit post on the messageboard r/copypasta from two years ago, including the text verbatim, without identifying details to be adapted by whoever uses it.

Other versions of the same text can be found on the image-sharing site iFunny, among other forums.

In 2014, HuffPost compiled a list of similar letters from 25 universities across the globe. While the letters contained different text and sentiment, the messages fit the same pattern of pranking.

Newsweek found a version of the same joke that was spread on campus at Yale University as far back as November 2005.

A 2016 article by Slate, which suggested the hoax was an annual tradition among students, also noted that the science behind it was misleading, speaking to one expert who attested that the behavior would not lead to drain blockages.

In any case, it appears that Jones fell hook, line and sinker for a puerile gag that's been the subject of childish guffaws.

Jones has recently been trying to shift new conspiracy theories about the solar eclipse, whose path of totality will cross the U.S. on Monday afternoon.

According to Jones, the government is using the solar eclipse as an opportunity to practice enacting martial law, which he says will then allegedly be enacted if former President Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. Martial law occurs when ordinary law is suspended and replaced by military rule.

Newsweek reached out to Jones for comment.