Alex Jones (1974–) is “one of the most prolific and influential conspiracy theorists in contemporary America'' according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and extremists. Jones got his start hosting a public-access television program in Austin, where he grew up. Those who knew Jones in his youth say he spoke cryptically about his family, fostering an aura of mystique. An Austin radio and web-streaming host, Jones broadcasts from a semi-secret location he has dubbed “The Central Texas Command Center and the Heart of the Resistance.” Since 1999, he has operated the independent news website InfoWars, known for propagating distasteful conspiracy theories. The most scandalous include the belief that a horrific mass school shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “hoax” involving child actors and that 9/11 was an inside job by the American government. More recently, Jones has focused on slandering drag queens as pedophiles, and the “Jewish mafia,” accusing Jewish people of dressing up as Nazis to fake Neo nazi encounters.
Jones is also a filmmaker, having produced a stream of manic, often poorly supported documentaries with titles like Terrorstorm: A History of Government-Sponsored Terrorism, 9/11: The Road to Tyranny, and Fall of the Republic: The Presidency of Barack H. Obama. In his films — as well as his hours-long radio and web broadcasts — Jones remains obsessed with the threat posed by shadowy, malevolent, elite “globalists” bent on worldwide domination. For example, he claims that the United Nations intends to release plagues that will kill off 80% of people in the world. The remaining population, he says, will be enslaved by the elite in crowded cities, turning the Earth into a “prison planet.”
In 2011, Jones’s allegations about the 9/11 attacks being an inside job landed him a guest spot on CNN, granting him more attention. In December 2015, Jones invited Donald Trump to appear on his radio show as a guest. This partnership would allow the then-presidential candidate to echo Jones’s accusations verbatim on the campaign trail, such as Hillary Clinton, being Satanic and a co-founder of ISIS.
When Trump was losing his re-election in March 2020, Jones addressed a massive crowd of Trump’s supporters at the Million Make America Great Again (MAGA) march. He worked the crowd up, announcing: “The system is publicly stealing this election from the biggest landslide and the biggest political realignment since 1776.”
“We will never back down to the Satanic pedophile, globalist New World Order and their walking-dead reanimated corpse, Joe Biden,” he said, “and we will never recognize him.” His calls for Trump supporters to protest Joseph Biden’s presidency, and its legitimacy, fueled the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol building, as did narratives spread on InfoWars. Its host Owen Shroyer, for example, was sentenced to two months behind bars for joining the J6 riot, which prosecutors said he “helped create” by spewing violent rhetoric and spreading baseless claims of election fraud to hundreds of thousands of InfoWars viewers.
