Alex Jones Lost Everything—And Still Won
Alex Jones couldn’t help himself. On Friday, just before a federal judge was set to decide the fate of Infowars, his conspiracy-media empire, Jones spun up yet another conspiracy.
He was on his way into a Houston courthouse as part of the ongoing saga over lies he told about the Sandy Hook school shooting. After six years of litigation, Jones owes $1.5 billion in defamation damages. The “FBI and CIA” had fabricated the charges against him, Jones explained, in his famously gravelly voice, to the half dozen or so cameramen in front of him. The agencies had organized a “deep-state operation against the American people,” he said, wiping the sweat off his head in the Houston heat. “This is a very, very exciting time to be alive.”
Apparently, the omnipotent FBI and CIA failed in their ultimate goal of thwarting Jones. The judge directed Jones to sell off his personal assets in order to pay up, but he spared Infowars. Right now the media network sits in purgatory: It will keep operating for the time being, but in future legal proceedings, Infowars could be liquidated to help Jones pay the damages. With all the money Jones owes, it’s not clear how much longer he can keep hold of his most treasured asset.
But the reality is that it doesn’t matter much if Infowars is shut down. Over the past three decades of his broadcast career, Jones helped pioneer an entire mode of conspiratorial thinking that is now dominant in pockets of the right. It will live on even if Infowars doesn’t.
I’m more familiar with this mode of thinking than I sometimes like to admit. I first encountered Alex Jones at a different time in both of our lives. He was a relatively popular but still niche curiosity, and his conspiracy theories were not yet as politically destructive as they would become. I was a high schooler in Texas. I came across him not in his hometown city, Austin, but more than 100 miles down the highway, near Houston, in my family’s computer room. I don’t remember exactly how I heard about Infowars or what segment roped me in (this was around 2008), but I remember the feeling it gave me: the satisfaction of having found a truth that most were blind to.
As a young teenager who didn’t feel represented by either party, I found that Jones’s videos offered a different option, one in which both Democrats and Republicans were simply giving cover to a cabal of wealthy elites. He skewed libertarian and made documentaries with titles such as The Obama Deception, but he also attacked the “police state” and went after George W. Bush. Anyone or anything with power was fair game.
I came to Jones alone but eventually found out that people around me were also peering into his world. When a substitute teacher at my high school referenced Infowars during class, my friends and I discussed it later with approbation. We all agreed that he was tapped into the good stuff. A lot of others saw what we saw. In 2011, Rolling Stone reported that Jones was drawing a bigger online audience than Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh combined.
Eventually, the spell broke. As I got older and saw more of his content, I realized that his spiel wasn’t adding up. FEMA was supposedly operating concentration camps across the country, Jones posted online. I highly doubt it, but maybe … ? I thought at the time. In 2010, when Jones said that Machete, a goofy action movie starring Danny Trejo, was actually a part of a plot to incite a race war in the U.S., I knew that Jones had lost his own plot. Maybe he’d never had it.
At some point after I came across him in the family computer room, Jones went from being a general skeptic with reactionary tendencies to being solidly ensconced in the far right. By the 2016 presidential election, he was buddying up to the billionaire GOP nominee. Donald Trump was calling in to his show for fawning interviews. Jones’s conspiracy theories became more comprehensive. He began giving copious amounts of oxygen to the type of conspiracy that anything embarrassing for the right is actually a manufactured operation by the federal government. In Jones’s worldview, the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was orchestrated by the feds to undermineTrump. The victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, were crisis actors.
But if there was a single inflection point that represented Jones’s shift from a libertarian free agent to someone explicitly fighting for right-wing causes, it was also the thing that now promises to be his undoing: Sandy Hook. After the tragic 2012 shooting in which 20 children and six adults were killed at a Connecticut elementary school, Jones skipped the moment of national grieving and went straight to conspiracy theorizing. The shooting was a hoax, he said, and the victims and their grieving families were “crisis actors” who were working for the gun-control lobby. Jones never provided proof for his claims but kept repeating them anyway, exposing victims’ family members to harassment and death threats. In 2018, the same year that the families sued Jones for defamation, he was also banned from nearly every major tech platform, in part because of the Sandy Hook abuse.
I checked in on Jones in 2019 to see what he was up to. What he was up to was being extremely Islamophobic. “You have a sickening alliance of hijab-wearing women [in Congress],” he said in one video from January 2019. “I mean, I go to restaurants … and there’s women in full burqas taking spoonfuls of food and eating it under their—we’re talking slits where their eyes are.” He went on to describe the women as “captured slaves who have had their genitals cut off.”
Jones’s own arc tracked neatly with the trajectory of the world around him. As he evolved, the mainstream right began to trade in conspiracy theories in a more explicit way than it had in decades. You can see the residue of this on the arc of the modern conspiracy movement. A space previously occupied by sometimes-lovable kooks became a theater in a vicious culture war. Jones’s conspiracy forerunners of the 1980s and ’90s, such as Art Bell and George Knapp, focused on UFOs and the paranormal. Occasionally, they also discussed the government, but with less political intensity. As Jones ascended, he started having less in common with the likes of Bell and Knapp and more in common with incendiary right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh. It’s hard to know if Jones influenced this trajectory or simply understood the direction it was going in before everyone else did, and ran in front of it. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
Either way, it bore out in the apparatus that became QAnon, a sprawling conspiracy theory that liberal elites are sexually abusing children in tunnels. QAnon was less a fringe way of explaining systems of power (the standard role of the previous era of conspiracy-theory culture) than an all-encompassing system of logic. Jones, appropriately, was an early booster of QAnon’s precursor, Pizzagate, which claimed that liberal elites were sexually abusing children out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.
Suggesting that events are hoaxes carried out by left-wing operators is now standard language in parts of the right, both among elected officials and among their supporters. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene supported unfounded theories that the Parkland school shooting was a “false flag.” Earlier this month, she posted a picture on Instagram of herself with Jones, accompanied by the caption “I stand with Alex Jones!” After the 2022 elementary-school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Representative Paul Gosar falsely claimed that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
Even if Infowars is shut down, this kind of conspiracism is not going away. Politicians and right-wing-media figures will probably keep making “false flag” claims and attempting to explain away inconvenient truths with unverified conspiracy theories. The thing that took Jones down—not just his Sandy Hook defamation but also his use of conspiracy theories as a political cudgel—is the clearest example of what his legacy will be.