Far-right media personality Alex Jones has claimed in an interview that his latest book has outsold all of the books in the Harry Potter franchise.
Jones, who is currently the subject of a second defamation trial over his Sandy Hook hoax allegations, made the claims about The Great Reset on the programme Louder with Crowder.
He provided no evidence to back his claim but asserted that runaway sales of the book are being suppressed by a publishing industry conspiracy.
“It went to number one on a whole bunch of charts, went to number two on Wall Street Journal and a bunch of others,” Jones told host Steven Crowder. “And then that’s even with some rigging. It should have been number one there.”
Jones then alleged that The New York Times refused to consider putting his book on its bestseller list because of bias against him.
“Stuff way down their list, we sold dozens of times more,” he said of the Times. “And that’s just in the first month of its sale at cash registers at stores. That’s how that happens. It doesn’t count all the massive amounts that got sold online at Amazon or InfoWars.com.
“So it is the number one book, not just fiction, not just non-fiction — all of them,” Jones continued. “More than any textbook, more than any Harry Potter book.”
The Great Reset, which was published at the end of August by Simon and Schuster, lays out his conspiratorial worldview.
“There is a powerful authoritarian takeover in process that is seeking to capture the entire human system and turn it into an artificial factory farm controlled system,” a blurb for the book reads. “We are in a war for the future of the world.”
As Crowder alludes to at the beginning of the clip in which Jones baselessly claims his book has outsold all the books in one of the most popular series ever — a boast not unlike former President Donald Trump’s false assertion that his book The Art of the Deal is the bestselling business book of all time — Jones has had a difficult year.
Jones, whose content is banned from numerous platforms including YouTube and Spotify, was the subject of the first trial in Texas in July for defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.
Jones testified under oath that he believes the shooting was real despite what he claimed for years on his show; a jury ordered him to pay the parents of Jesse Lewis, one of the students killed, $4.1m in compensatory damages. The next day, he was ordered to pay $45.2m in punitive damages.
Jones is now in the midst of a second trial for saying the shooting did not happen, this time in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was sanctioned by the judge in that trial on Tuesday for failing to turn over analytic data from his website regarding the popularity of his show.
