Years ago, when I was still at the Chronicle news desk, I got a phone call from Mike Hanson, who at the time was Alex Jones’ main “producer,” sidekick, and chief personal promoter. I’m not sure of the year, but it was before the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. At the time, the Jones bullhorn was devoted primarily to proclaiming “9/11 was an inside job.”
Hanson wasn’t calling about that; this was sort of a chest-beating marketing call. Jones was about to launch a weekly newspaper in Austin, and Hanson wanted to let me know that Infowars was coming specifically for the Chronicle. “You’ll be out of business in six months,” Hanson warned me. Indeed, over the next few weeks, vending boxes with the new publication appeared around Downtown. (Editor’s note: Mike Hanson vigorously denies this conversation ever happened.)
The vending boxes disappeared just about as quickly. My amateur Google searches now fail to provide evidence that Jones’ newsweekly ever existed. Meanwhile, the Chronicle – like every print publication, somewhat diminished by something called the “World Wide Web” – soldiers on. Hanson no longer works for Jones, and in his new book – The Madness of Believing: A Memoir From Inside Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Machine – former Infowars video editor and field producer Josh Owens suggests the two men are semi-estranged. Nevertheless, Hanson apparently still devotes time and energy to documenting his Jones-related history. Somebody has to do it, I guess.
In a much better world, Jones’ entire history would instead disappear into oblivion. At the moment, he’s in the news again, for a couple of headline reasons. Like a handful of other right-wing grifters (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens [no relation to Josh], Marjorie Taylor Greene), he’s suddenly lost his enthusiasm for Donald Trump (primarily over the war on Iran), and Trump has responded nastily in kind. More importantly, it appears that a modicum of justice has finally arrived for the Newtown, Connecticut families that Jones viciously vilified and harassed in the aftermath of their children’s murders at the Sandy Hook elementary school. The families eventually sued, and Jones repeatedly lost in court, but Jones’ lawyers managed to win endless delays.
Jones still owes the Sandy Hook families somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. If the latest judgment is confirmed, Infowars and all its assets will eventually transfer to the owners of the satirical news site, The Onion – which has already posted an Infowars parody site that hopes to usher Jones and his legacy into permanent, clownish disrepute. (Inaugural Onion headline: “TURN YOUR PISS INTO GOLD”)
That part of the tale isn’t told directly in The Madness of Believing, as Josh Owens says he wasn’t there when the Sandy Hook story broke and wasn’t involved in any subsequent coverage. That sounds more than a little disingenuous; the Sandy Hook legal aftermath was part and parcel of the Infowars and Jones story for more than a decade, and impossible to ignore. Nevertheless, Owens delivers enough revelations about the scurrilous Jones “news” factory to re-confirm the actual meaning of “conspiracy theories” at Infowars: lying for money, by the mail-order truckload.
To a degree, The Madness of Believing reads like a classic coming-of-age tale, almost Dickensian in its narrative structure. A Young Man from the Provinces (film school in Georgia) seeks his fortune in the Big City of Austin, only to fall under the spell of a Sinister Confidence Man, who uses him for his nefarious purposes, until the scales finally fall from Our Hero’s eyes. There are many early hints that the SCM is not what he seems, but It takes Owens four years – 2013 to 2017 – to come to his senses. He does so thanks to the love of a good, wise woman and the loyalty of a clear-eyed friend.
After some bittersweet therapy (“The guilt clawed at me, insistent and unyielding”) summarized in his prologue, Owens has apparently spent the years since learning how to write a book.
The results are mixed. His most important testimony concerns the field “reporting” jobs he undertook at Jones’ direction, and which generally consisted of manufacturing hateful and fear-mongering incidents with little or no connection to reality. On his first day, he’s instructed how to doctor sources onscreen in order to mislead viewers. Before too long, he’s assigned field reports that begin with some kernel of actual news that can readily be spun into a fantasy of terror and outrage.
Dangerous Fukushima radiation rumored on the California coast? Can’t find the evidence, produce the confirmation story anyway (there’s anti-radiation nostrums to sell). Friendly, self-sufficient Muslim community in upstate New York? At Jones’ direction, Owens and his colleagues produce footage that confirms Jones‘ presupposition: It’s a terrorist training camp. With Muslims and Central American immigrants rapidly becoming the right-wing’s Public Enemies 1 & 2 – and Jones is nothing if not sensitive to reactionary, racist trends – Owens and other Info-warriors begin generating multiple bogus tales of Invaders from the South.
Although he largely sidesteps the Sandy Hook disgrace, Josh Owens is to be commended for exposing in some detail the internal workings of Jones’ garbage-dump operation of bullying, hate, and lies.
In a particularly ridiculous episode, Owens films another “reporter” dressed as an ISIS terrorist, complete with fake scimitar and rubber severed head, apparently crossing the Rio Grande. (It’s actually a nearby U.S. stream, because the producers realize the river itself is in fact too heavily patrolled.) Jones says the “stunt” – which of course goes viral online – serves to confirm that “the border is wide open.” What it in fact demonstrates is the willingness of Jones and the Infowars group, including Owens, to generate dishonest, race-baiting hysteria for an audience ravenous to consume it.
Eventually, the repetitive dishonesty pushes Owens to look for an exit, and thanks to his clear-eyed girlfriend, and despite Jones’ pleading (and a dubious non-disclosure agreement), he leaves the job. Befriended by British writer Jon Ronson, Owens tips Ronson that Jones’ heroic “origin story” – that he fled his Rockwall high school after exposing some corrupt cops – is also bogus. Ronson discovers that in fact, Jones was a vicious bully whose classmates eventually took revenge, and Jones’ father decided to move the family to Austin to protect him.
Owens has been praised as a “whistleblower,” but for anyone who was paying attention, the klaxon on Jones and Infowars sounded decades ago. The Madness of Believing confirms what any sane Austinite (to Jones, liberal “trendies”) realized long ago. Alex Jones is an unscrupulous fantasist who, like generations of American confidence grifters, rediscovered the online version of a very old principle: You can fool some of the people all of the time – and if you are quite unscrupulous, you can become fabulously rich in the process.
Owens’ time at Infowars coincided with Jones’ discovery that the quickest way to grotesque wealth was in direct sales of quack remedies to the rubes. The most-hyped products were usually linked to doomsday prepping: tinctures of iodine, colloidal silver, virility and “brain-building” nostrums, as well as “patriotic” prepper gear from tents to buckets of freeze-dried food. When the cash stream slowed, like any Sunday morning TV preacher, Jones would call for “money bombs” of viewer donations, screaming variations of, “If you don’t help now, the globalists will crush us …”
Are there indeed enough credulous people in the U.S. to sustain such flagrant, transparent con games? For evidence, consider only the current ultra-grifting occupant of the White House. Jones was initially skeptical of Trump, but then stuck his finger in the MAGA wind and realized there was mucho money to be made among the deplorables. Groomed by longtime GOP gangster Roger Stone, Jones got Trump to appear on his show – and Big Daddy stroked Little Alex.
Of course, they were made for each other. Trump is just Jones writ large, with an inherited kick-start, a trash-TV Unreality Show, and the consequently inevitable star treatment from corporate media. Jones rose from cable-access obscurity to a ride on the Austin “weirdness” credulity wave. Initially, the cool kids treated him like the village eccentric, good for ranting film cameos and a little spice of nominally outsider culture. As his rhetoric grew more hateful – Jones having discovered the sewer where the big money flows – locals began to distance themselves, as from the noisome drunk at a party of stoners.
But he didn’t need them anymore.
Of all Jones’ relentless, vicious lies, the denial of the Sandy Hook school massacre was the most heartless and most egregious. It was useful to Jones, because it amply fed his “secret government” fantasies. More importantly, it fed his relentless promotion of guns, utterly fictionalized “gun rights,” and the completely bogus hysteria that official “demons” (e.g. Obama and Hillary) were coming to take his credulous viewers’ guns. Those lies required inventing whole-hog the notion that the bloody, grotesque massacre, of schoolchildren and their teachers (by an also gun-obsessed and seriously disturbed young man) was instead a manufactured “false flag” operation involving all levels of government and, even more viciously, the bereaved parents of the murdered children – who were either “crisis actors” who lived on unharmed, or who never existed at all.
Jones was not alone in promoting this absolute nonsense – it became an ongoing industry among the hustlers who deal in this lucrative horseshit – but he had the loudest online bullhorn, and he encouraged and amplified vicious harassment of the families, some of which reportedly continues to this day.
But the families heroically fought back, at great cost and personal risk, repeatedly defeating the disingenuous Jones in court, bankrupting him (in theory) and forcing a legal disgorgement of his assets. It remains to be seen whether Jones will in fact pay some or all of the estimated $1.5 billion judgment – like the Grifter-in-Chief, he’s learned how to orgiastically abuse the legal process. In the short term, The Onion has achieved effective control of Infowars, but Jones has reportedly absconded with some of his broadcasting equipment, and like a cartoon villain, has vowed to rise again.
Of course, neither Jones nor Trump is a new American phenomenon. We have always been richly plagued by brazen confidence men and shameless hustlers, commercial, religious, and political (often in combination). They have lived devoted to the principle wryly described long ago by H.L. Mencken: “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” Today, among Mencken’s ubiquitous “plain people” we can certainly include the phalanx of arrogant and ignorant tech-and-crypto billionaires underwriting the Toxic Orange Regime, as well as the Gold Bugs and Gun Goobers buying colloidal snake oil from Infowars.
Although he largely sidesteps the Sandy Hook disgrace, Josh Owens is to be commended for exposing in some detail the internal workings of Jones’ garbage-dump operation of bullying, hate, and lies. He took his time to produce this record, and he’s over-generous with “re-created” dialogue from a decade ago. Nevertheless, the book is a useful addition to the growing literature of Online Griftology. It’s also an up-close profile of an unstable, unpredictable, brooding, and arbitrary boss. Owens recounts at some length Jones’ compulsive vodka guzzling and reckless gun-play, in what amounts to a dangerous, living caricature of the “manliness” obsession of the MAGA cult.
Austinites should hope that, with some little luck, the now semi-fugitive Jones will find some other venue for his dismal hate factory. Too much to wish for, I suppose. Dating back to Stephen F. Austin, the state of Texas has long welcomed grandiose hustlers in all their leering shamelessness – it’s a major industry at the Capitol, where Attorney General Ken Paxton is the current champion of amorality, closely followed by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. A braver city should strive periodically to cleanse itself of these money-grubbing parasites. Currently, for example, there is an invasive carpetbagging muskrat that richly deserves expulsion, and half-a-dozen other scurrilous robber barons who have earned a good tar-and-feathering and an escort out of town.
Alas, one can only dream.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated since publication to note Mike Hanson’s dispute with Michael King’s recollection of a phone conversation.
From 2005-2020, now-retired Austin Chronicle News Editor Michael King wrote about city and state politics from a progressive perspective in his weekly column, “Point Austin.” We’re pleased to bring back his column whenever he’s inspired to tackle the state we’re in.
