Alex Jones: The lie as a business model

Alex Jones has been spreading outrageous lies and conspiracy theories for years – and earning millions from it. Will the recent court decisions change this business model? And how big is his influence anyway?

In December 2016, a young man drives from North Carolina to Washington DC, pulls out a gun in front of a pizza place in the north-west of the city and starts shooting. He believes that children are being kept as sex slaves in the basement of the pizzeria. None of this is true. “Pizzagate” is a conspiracy theory propagated by Alex Jones and others. Jones, faced with a lawsuit, will months later apologize to the pizzeria’s owner.

Again and again people have tried to defend themselves against Jones and his empire of lies. Even if they were right in the end, the damage to them was often immense, economically and psychologically. For Jones, however, the calculation has always worked out: more lies meant more listeners, viewers, clicks and orders in his online shop.

September 11 as a decisive event

In the 1990s, the Texan native, born in 1974, was just a weirdo telling wild stories on TV somewhere late at night. At the turn of the millennium he began to publish his programs on the Internet from home.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 was a drastic event for him. Early on, he claimed there was a 98 percent probability that it was a government-sponsored controlled bombing of the World Trade Center. Jones became one of the leading speakers who did not believe the official reports.

Vitamins, Diets, Videos

This made him enormously popular. At times well over 100 local stations broadcast his show. His trademark: a guttural, rumbling Western hero’s voice, tirades uttered with clenched jaw, accompanied by explosive laughter, head thrown back.

Millions of people listened – and visited his website Infowars.com. Jones still sells a lot of merchandise there for supporters of conspiracy theories: vitamins, diets, accessories for the supposedly impending civil war. Also literature and videos. Jones has made tens of millions of dollars from this.

Ex-President Trump made Jones even better known

That the government allegedly staged attacks to declare martial law and then impose a dictatorship is one of Jones’ classics. He represents the conspiracy theory of the “New Global World Order”, according to which elites around the world and in secret are working on a coup. Allegedly there: the Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton is a demon from hell who founded the terrorist organization “Islamic State” together with Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton is the head of a pedophile ring – these are his stories. In Donald Trump, the candidate and then president, Jones found a brother in spirit. Trump repeated Jones’ stories on TV and on Twitter – and so the speaker had found an even bigger amplifier.

Cheering for the storming of the Capitol

Does he himself believe what he says? In a custody process after his divorce, there was talk of a narcissistic personality disorder. How many people actually believe what he is spreading is not known. Perhaps his influence has also shrunk since major internet platforms banned him for lying and hate speech. But he helped prepare a climate in which everyone in the United States now seems to only believe what he or she wants to believe.

The fact that, for example, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in conservative circles can be taken for granted as a big betrayal also has something to do with the fact that moderators like Jones or the late Rush Limbaugh have hammered into their listeners for decades that they are being betrayed by corrupt elites in the Washington swamp . Around the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Jones was seen and heard cheering on Trump supporters. He has already been summoned by the competent investigative committee.

His seed has long since sprouted

In the court case brought against him by the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School, Jones finally admitted that the massacre took place. However, his theory that such attacks were staged by the government is now being picked up and spread by Republicans on the right-wing edge of the party.

The early judgments at Sandy Hook Elementary School are a signal: Making false claims about real people does real harm, and you will be held accountable for it. But no matter how much Jones has to pay in the end: His seed has long since germinated.