Paul Joseph Watson (born 24 May 1982) is a British right wing YouTuber, radio host, and conspiracy theorist.
Paul Joseph Watson was born on 24 May 1982 at Jessop Hospital in Sheffield to Philip and Hazel Watson.
2002
Watson has been working at InfoWars since October 2002.
According to Watson, he was initially invited to contribute by Alex Jones in 2002, and rapidly gained substantial compensation for his work on InfoWars, as stated by the former spouse of the site's founder.
Watson, along with Jones and InfoWars as a whole, originally covered conspiracy theories such as chemtrails, the New World Order and the Illuminati.
2004
In 2004, he registered Global Propaganda Matrix as the company responsible for his website.
2010
By the mid-2010s, their coverage increasingly shifted to criticising feminism, Islam, and left-wing politics.
2011
Since 2011, Watson has hosted his own YouTube channel, prisonplanetlive, on which he expresses his views on topics such as contemporary society, politics, and modern liberalism in an often mocking manner.
He rose to prominence on his YouTube channel by criticizing and mocking the "woke mob", social justice warriors, feminism and anti-racist movements.
As of May 2023, his channel has over 1.9 million subscribers.
2012
Watson previously described himself as a libertarian and supported Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election.
2016
Until July 2016, Watson embraced the label "alt-right", but he now identifies as part of the New Right.
In a 2016 interview for a student newspaper in Sheffield, UK, Watson said he grew up on a council estate with few financial resources, and that by 18, he was teetotal and exercising three hours per day.
In a 2016 tweet, he said he no longer considered himself a libertarian because Gary Johnson "made the term an embarrassment."
Watson has also called himself a conservative and considers modern-day conservatism a countercultural movement.
In a November 2016 Facebook post, he differentiated between the New Right and the alt-right.
He claimed that the alt-right "likes to fester in dark corners of subreddits and obsess about Jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler."
He and Mike Cernovich have feuded with figures such as Richard B. Spencer and David Duke, who see white nationalism as necessary for the alt-right.
In 2016, Watson was an early proponent of allegations that Hillary Clinton suffers from numerous serious medical conditions, though he was unable to provide any evidence.
Watson's part in the manufacture and dissemination of the rumour was taken up by the National Enquirer and mentioned in the mainstream media as part of a discussion of the role of rumour and conspiracy theory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
2017
Watson has been described as a member of "the new far-right" by The New York Times, which wrote in August 2017 that his "videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe" and convey his opposition to modernist architecture and modern art.
Iman Abou Atta, director of the anti-Islamophobia group Tell MAMA, has said that Watson "has become 'the' nexus for anti-Muslim accounts that we have mapped... He has become an influencer in promoting information—much of it bizarre and untrue—which has been regurgitated by anti-Muslim and anti-migrant accounts time and time again."
Although he endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Watson declared in a tweet on 6 April 2017, he was "officially OFF the Trump train" after Trump's decision to launch missile strikes on Syria in response to a Khan Shaykhun chemical attack several days earlier, believing Trump had reneged on his promise not to intervene in Syria.
He said Trump was "just another deep state/Neo-con puppet".
After a decrease in Twitter followers occurred, he denied he had "turned on Trump", saying he was only "off the Trump train in terms of Syria" and blaming the media for "fake news".
He declared in a separate tweet he would shift his focus to ensuring French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of the National Front would be elected in the 2017 election, which she lost.
Donald Trump Jr.. retweeted Watson's reference to French celebrities leaving France if Le Pen was elected and referred dismissively to similar reputed claims in the U.S. before Trump Sr. was elected.
2018
However, a 2018 article for The Daily Beast said his birth certificate indicated the family lived in a house in Grenoside, a suburban district in the north of the city; Sheffield City Council stated that the house had never been in public ownership.
According to The Daily Beast, "the Watson family would live in a series of similar communities that run along the leafy northwest suburbs of Sheffield, separating the city from the picturesque Peak District National Park" over the next twenty years.
From just before the age of ten, Watson and his family lived in Loxley, another area of Sheffield.
Watson described his formative moment as being when, at the age of 18, he watched The Secret Rulers of the World, a documentary in which journalist Jon Ronson accompanied Alex Jones in infiltrating Bohemian Grove in California, a place where some conspiracy theorists believe global elites plot the New World Order.
He has described British conspiracy theorist David Icke, whom he first read as a teenager, as the person who woke him up.
After the release of the Ronson documentary, Watson launched his own website called Propaganda Matrix.
On 16 June 2018, Watson announced that he had joined the UK Independence Party along with Mark Meechan and Carl Benjamin.
2019
In May 2019, Facebook and Instagram permanently banned Watson for violation of hate speech policies.
Watson's career emerged through his work for conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones.
As editor-at-large of Jones' website InfoWars, he helped promote fake news and advocated for 9/11, chemtrail, and New World Order conspiracy theories.
Subsequently, reaching a significant audience, both Watson and Jones altered their focus.
They now mainly criticise feminism, Islam, and left-wing politics.
Watson also contributes to InfoWars's talk radio program The Alex Jones Show, which he occasionally hosts or co-hosts.
