Paul Joseph Watson, the No. 2 star on Alex Jones’ InfoWars platforms, appears to have emerged mostly unscathed after a sweeping social media purge on Monday removed much of the company’s content from sites like Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify.
As of Tuesday morning, Watson remained active on both Facebook and YouTube, using both platforms to vehemently denounce actions taken by the social media companies to ban and deplatform InfoWars content. Watson, who describes himself as editor at large on InfoWars, was also untouched on Twitter — which remains the only major social media platform to have taken no action in the InfoWars purge so far.
Watson has long been the company’s second most influential figure, with an audience often larger than Jones himself. As of this writing, Watson reaches more than 700,000 followers on Facebook, almost 900,000 on Twitter and more than 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube.
Like Jones, Watson has a long history of propagating conspiracy theories to his millions of followers. In one YouTube video viewed more than six million times, he suggested then-candidate Hillary Clinton was suffering from brain damage. In this 2007 piece — now deleted — Watson and Jones suggested that the FBI was involved in the 1995 domestic terror attack in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
Facebook, YouTube and Watson did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.
“Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube all completely banned InfoWars within 12 hours of each other, clearly suggesting big-tech collusion and proving that terms of service are all bulls—,” Watson said in his most recent YouTube video. “This is political censorship. This is the purge.”
Watson, with his distinctive British accent, has been a part of the InfoWars landscape for more than a decade and is most famous for his staccato monologues filmed in front of a map denouncing Islam, political correctness, pop culture and modern architecture.
Watson has been affiliated with Jones since the age of 20, according to The Daily Beast, which reported that Jones’ ex-wife, Kelly has predicted Watson would ultimate supplant her ex-husband despite an often stormy relationship between the two men.
“I think PJW is a smarter, more conniving version of Alex. He’s definitely better educated, more erudite, way more savvy,” Kelly Jones told the Beast. “Paul has endured what he has from Alex because he is going to surpass him. He’s popular with the today crowd and I think he knows absolutely what he’s doing.”