In this completely normal May 21, 2017 photo released by the Saudi Press Agency we see Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Saudi King Salman, First Lady Melania Trump and President Donald Trump at the new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Saudi Press Agency via AP)

This past weekend, President Trump got some heat for a bizarre photo in which he’s touching a glowing orb with two other world leaders in a dark room. It inspired a torrent of memes and jokes about Trump controlling the world with his magical orb. But InfoWars, founded by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, would like you to stop making fun of the photos. The site seems to believe that this is no time for conspiracy theories.


From InfoWars:

The Saudi Embassy originally tweeted out the photo, which was taken at The Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh. As soon as the picture went public, however, the context was completely lost in a sea of Twitter nonsense:

InfoWars goes on to show some of the jokes people were posting on Twitter like this:


And this:

And this:


But InfoWars seemed to take offense at the idea that Trump would be a part of some other-worldly ritual where a bunch of billionaire world leaders all touched a glowing globe together.

This is the same website run by Alex Jones who claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting—which killed 20 children who were between the ages of 6 and 7, and six adults—was a false flag operation intended to allow Barack Obama to take everyone’s guns away. InfoWars has repeatedly spread the ludicrous lie that the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 was staged by actors.

InfoWars ended its post about Trump’s orb ceremony with a question: “What do you think? Is Trump ushering in an evil new era? Or was he just caught in an ill thought out photo-op?”


Surely, the correct answer is an ill thought out photo-op. But InfoWars hasn’t been so generous with its own interpretation of other politicians in the past. InfoWars has spread plenty of conspiracy theories about world leaders being involved in the Illuminati, mind control, and satanic rituals. It’s hard to imagine what InfoWars would do with a photo of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton fondling a glowing orb with Muslim leaders.

Screenshot from an InfoWars article about Hillary Clinton’s alleged ties to satanic rituals (Screenshot/InfoWars)


In fact, InfoWars was the central hub for the conspiracy theory known as PizzaGate, which alleged that a child sex ring controlled by the Clinton campaign was being run out of a Washington, DC pizza shop. Alex Jones eventually apologized for spreading the bullshit story, but only after he got untold numbers of people to believe it, not to mention one man who opened fire in the pizza restaurant to “investigate” the allegations for himself. Jones has since removed much of his more inflammatory articles and videos about Pizzagate.

But hopefully InfoWars and their crusaders of freedom don’t see the other photos of the center that Trump and his Saudi and Egyptian hosts were opening in Riyadh. If you’re really concerned about a conspiracy to spy on the globe, it was hiding in plain sight.


The Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology, built in just 30 days according to a an overjoyed Ivanka Trump, monitors the world for extremist views. Ivanka joked that she “may need to borrow those contractors.”

Analysts work before the arrival of President Trump and Saudi King Salman for a ceremony to mark the opening of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology on May 21, 2017 in Riyadh (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)


As news outlet Al Arabiya put it when describing the new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology:

The center has developed innovative techniques that can monitor, process and analyze extremists’ speeches with high accuracy, all phases of data processing and analysis are done in no more than six seconds once the data or comments are posted on the Internet, allowing unprecedented levels of facing extremist activities in the digital world.


Saudi Arabia’s definition of extremist might differ from your own. This is the country, for example, that sentenced a Palestinian poet to death for insulting Islam and storing photos of women on his phone. The poet, Ashraf Fayadh, had his sentence reduced to 8 years in prison and 800 lashes.

President Donald Trump listens during a ceremony to mark the opening of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology on May 21, 2017 in Riyadh (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)


And Al Arabiya continued:



The center operates in the extremists’ most widely used languages and dialects. Advanced analytical models are being developed to locate digital media platforms, highlight extremist focal point, and secret sources of polarization and acquiring activities.


Funny how the completely paranoid and delusional folks over at InfoWars didn’t pick up on all of that. Just a bad photo-op, according to InfoWars. Nothing to see here.