About

Shirtless Alex Jones at Lunch refers to an image of conservative talk show host Alex Jones eating lunch without his shirt on that sparked jokes on Twitter.

Precursor

Alex Jones is known for posing without his shirt on on his social media channels in an effort to showcase his physique. Esquire^[1] published a compilation of such images in October of 2016, following a picture of Jones posting a picture of himself posing shirtless on top of a horse.

He also notably ripped off his shirt on his television show while ranting about Hillary Clinton.

Origin

On February 28th, 2017, German magazine Der Spiegel^[2] published an article about Alex Jones. For their header image, they used an image of Jones posing shirtless while eating lunch and giving the camera two thumbs up (shown below). According to the article, Jones took off his shirt without explanation.

"It's afternoon, and Jones is walking through the studio, his adrenaline level high and his blood sugar low. He needs to get something to eat. Platters of BBQ – chicken, beef and sausages – are set out on a table in the conference room. "Good barbecue," says Jones. "You tasted it already?"
He piles up food onto a plastic plate, and then he suddenly takes off his shirt without explanation. With his bare torso, he sits there and shovels meat into his mouth, a caricature of manliness, but also a show of power to the reporter sitting in front of him. He can do as he pleases.
Then Jones gets up and holds out a sausage. "Wanna suck?" he asks.

Spread

The image quickly became the target for jokes on Twitter, as users wrote captions for it and photoshopped it to include Jones in various other scenarios. The tweets were compiled in a Twitter Moment^[3] the following day. On Reddit, Isai76^[4] posted the picture with the comment "Alex Jones has the 'hot dogs defrosting in the sink' vibe" and gained 64 points. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online reaction to the shirtless photograph, including AOL News,^[5] Gothamist,^[6] Death and Taxes,^[7] and Queerty.^[8]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References