An Infowars insider on the warped world of Alex Jones

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, an InfoWars insider on the warped universe of Alex Jones.

0:19When I first started working there, I would say I was a believer. It's why I took the job. I was a well-meaning young guy who thought that going to work there was going to make a difference. I mean, that is genuinely what I felt. Josh Owens was a film school dropout when he was offered a job on Infowars, the online platform run by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. What's dangerous is the pharmaceuticals. What's dangerous is the vaccines. What's dangerous is the high-fructose corn syrup. What's dangerous is the fluoride. That's killing millions of people a year. Josh was a fan. He thought Alex Jones was spreading not conspiracies, but truths.

1:00Truths the establishment wanted to keep secret. And he seemed to have fun while he was doing it. I want this covered tomorrow night. I want GMOs covered. I want what's going on covered. I want to fight these son of a bitches. Jones made the world seem exciting. Jones made the world seem cinematic. And it was an ideology initially. That did come. But initially it was just that he made the world feel like a movie, and that's what hooked me.

1:31Josh joined Infowars in 2013, a year after a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six adults. We've got 911. What's the location of the emergency? Sandy Hook School. I think there's somebody shooting in here. Sandy Hook School. It was a horrific act which prompted probably the most serious conversation the US has ever had about gun control. We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news, I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent. And that was especially true today. Alex Jones offered another take.

2:14Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it. Completely fake. The grieving parents were actors. Their children were alive. The whole thing was a government plot to take away people's guns.

2:33In 2018, Jones was sued for defamation by the families. He was eventually ordered to pay a record$1.4 billion in damages and filed for bankruptcy. Last Friday, after nearly 30 years of spreading lies, InfoWars recorded its final broadcast. They're turning the power off at midnight. Private detectives are coming in to close the doors. And they're going to act like they've got their big-ass victory. In an unexpected twist, the site is now on the verge of being taken over by The Onion. Well, they're known for joking around, but now The Onion is getting downright serious. The legendary satirical newspaper has a new plan to take over InfoWars.

3:12Hi everybody, it's Tim Heidecker here. I'm broadcasting now live on the internet. While they wait for the deal to clear the courts, The Onion has already got stuck into Jones, with the help of comedian Tim Heidecker. And make no mistake, we will be the new InfoWars.

3:34But so many questions remain. How Jones was able to peddle such awful lies. why so many people believed him, and how the people who worked for him could live with themselves. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, is this really the end of Alex Jones?

3:57Josh Owens, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. You've just published a really great book, I'd recommend it, about your time working on Infowars. It's called The Madness of Believing, a memoir from inside Alex Jones's conspiracy machine. Take me back to the beginning. When did you first hear of Jones? When did he come onto your radar? The first time I heard Jones's name was while watching a movie with a friend. We were watching Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove. And there's a scene where Sterling Hayden's character goes on this tirade about water fluoridation. Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

4:40My friend paused the movie and he asked me at that time, had I ever heard of Alex Jones? And I had no idea who Alex Jones was. And he started quizzing me basically about water fluoridation. And he ran to the bathroom and he got a tube of toothpaste. and on the label of the toothpaste, there's a warning that said, if you swallow more than a pea-sized amount, call poison control. And so that led to him asking me if there's a pea-sized amount and you swallow a pea-sized amount, then why can we drink unlimited amounts depending on how much water you consume from the tap? And I had no idea. I didn't know what fluoride was.

5:17I didn't know who Alex Jones was. That night, I looked at his website, InfoWars. I watched a documentary that he had put out. And I just got hooked. I'm Alex Jones. Get ready for another edition of InfoWars Nightly News straight ahead. So essentially what Jones would do is he would take what was in the news and sort of use it to to push his own ideas. I am so excited about this because if you realize we have them sneaking around in secret meetings with the plan. He has this vast vocabulary, he is incredibly certain about everything that he says. So you got George Washington in the West battling the head of the Illuminati, a Satanist, in the East.

6:01Classic battle. And they killed him. They poisoned him. He's very fiery and bombastic. They literally want you domesticated. They want to dehorn you, declaw you. But he can also be incredibly funny, unintentionally so. When he tries to be funny, it doesn't really work out. I don't like him putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay. Do you understand that? He sort of jumps back and forth from comedic depictions of the world to these violent fantasies to taking the news and breaking it down and giving a perspective that isn't something that, at least back then, that you would necessarily hear anywhere else.

6:51And come 2013, you applied for and were successful in getting a job at Infowars. Tell me, what was it like at the beginning? Yeah, well, it was a big step. I dropped out of film school. I moved halfway across the country from Georgia to Texas. I'd never been to Texas before. I'd never been to Austin. And initially, I was hired as a camera operator and video editor. Okay. And tell me about your first impressions of Alex Jones when you finally came face to face with him. When I first met him in person, I remember texting my girlfriend, Lacey, and I said, he's so much nicer than I thought he would be.

7:28Because when I first met him, he was just very kind and jovial and he has this magnetic presence. And what's crazy is that that very first moment, there were these two other employees that were in the room and they were sort of joking around. And Jones quoted Dr. Strangelove, which was the movie years earlier that it pulled me in. It was just one of those surreal moments. And little did I know that the next four years of my life would be one big surreal moment. But that was that was sort of my first time meeting the guy.

8:13So Alex Jones became notorious for spreading many dangerous and occasionally completely bizarre conspiracy theories. When you were working alongside him, did you ever get the sense that he actually believed the stuff that he was saying? I used to be asked this question, does Jones believe the things that he says? And my answer was always, what does it matter? Because he talks to presumably millions of people who do believe the things that he says. But I read this book by Harry Frankfurt called On BS. and the idea of that book is that liars skew the truth and that BSers just don't care what the truth is and so I just don't think Jones holds any value for truth so he can sort of say what he wants when he wants it's always changing now is he a liar yes he is a liar but I just think it's far more complicated than that the sort of cynicism behind so much of his behavior and he He was a great amplifier, wasn't he, of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, this idea that there was a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza joint in Washington that had something to do with Hillary Clinton.

9:20And he didn't even believe that at the start, right? But then he realized that his viewers were into it. So he jumped on board. Yes, that's exactly what happened. He started getting pushback in comments and phone calls into his radio show of people saying that he was covering Pizzagate up. And so then he started unabashedly covering it, claiming that he believed what was going on. They go, I love you, Satan. I love you, Satan, as the baby begs. And they all run over and start drinking the blood and slurping. And they all have sex with each other. And they just pledge to get your kids. So, you know, it was all calculated.

9:56And with terrifying consequences, because a gunman who was a loyal listener to Jones, right, he went into the restaurant, didn't he, and fired shots. There were families having to dive under tables. Real life consequences. to his BS, as you put it. Yes. Yeah. It's hard to know how far and wide those consequences go. Jones did this on a daily basis for decades. And so what is the impact? What has it done to so many people that we might never hear from? Yeah. And I guess before 2016, before Trump won the first presidential election. A lot of the things that Alex Jones was always banging on about seemed wacky, fringe concerns.

10:40And then all of a sudden Trump's in the White House and he's repeating so many of Alex Jones's talking points. So I was in that world when that transition happened, where Jones was on the fringe. And then all of a sudden it seemed like so many people in the mainstream, you know, it started with Trump, but so many people in the mainstream started sort of turning in that direction. But I mean, then COVID happened, January 6th happened, a second Trump presidency. It just got so much worse. But yeah, I mean, things drastically moved from the fringe to the mainstream. And I think Jones played a big role in that.

11:15I mean, there's a reason that Trump campaigning in 2016 came on Jones's show. I just want to finish by saying your reputation's amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. And in terms of why Jones was spreading these conspiracies, whether he believed in any of them or not, I guess from your book, it seems clear that the more outlandish he was, the more his viewers responded, the more money he would make. But he wasn't just making money from eyeballs on his videos, right? He was also hawking them, dodgy products, supplements to counter the various conspiracies that he claimed were alive in the US.

11:58Yeah. Yeah. So when I first started listening to him, he was really only selling like t-shirts and stickers and DVDs. He would encourage people to copy his DVDs and give them out for free. And when I first started listening to him, my radar was up. Like, is this guy just a grifter? Is he just doing it for money? And when I saw him say that, I was like, well, He's saying to give his stuff out for free. I mean, ultimately, that was just free advertising for him. But I was a little too naive to see it in those terms. But I edited the very first ad for the very first privately labeled supplement that he sold, which was an iodine tincture.

12:35And after that, it was just nonstop new products that he was coming out with. I am very proud to announce the introduction of the highest quality InfoWars Biome Defense Probiotics. And it went from no one really ever talking about his products to a mandate that every video had to end with an ad. I began to get into iodine a few years ago because it was helping me and my family so much get healthy. And this iodine tincture that you mentioned, what was that supposedly combating? Why would you take such a tincture, a potion, whatever it was? Yeah, well, so his concept was that it was combating radiation.

13:17Not long after he started selling it is when he sent us to the West Coast to report on an idea that he believed that radiation was floating over onto the West Coast after the Fukushima disaster. Okay, an idea, like a hypothesis that he personally had, and you were sent there to stand it up. There was a beach called Surfer's Beach where a man had taken a video and he had shown that there were, he had a Geiger counter, and he showed that there were high radiation readings on the beach. And so local officials, federal officials, they all looked into this and they had an explanation for it. They it was contained.

13:56It was in a very small area. But Jones started forming this idea that the entire West Coast was was riddled with it. So we drove up the West Coast to check for radiation readings. And other than Surfers Beach, we found nothing. But then we started getting these phone calls saying that Jones was the angriest that employees had ever seen him. And then calls from him directly undermining us. It wasn't that there was no radiation. It was that we were just too stupid to know where to look. So we started looking everywhere. We started going to these fishing vessels, testing crab that they had caught off the coast.

14:38We were going to sushi markets. We were going to every beach we could find. And we even went to an old, an old, it was a military base, I believe, that was closed down because of radiation levels. And we thought maybe we could find something there. And we found nothing there. And it was, it was like this moment where I started to, I think all of us, we were like, well, so what are we supposed to do? Never clicking in our mind like, oh, you could just lie because that's essentially what he wants. But that's the thing is that he wasn't calling us saying, I want you to lie. He was making us question our own ability, our own version of reality, the things that we were seeing right in front of our faces with our own eyes.

15:26It wasn't until we got back that we really started to click like, oh, we were sent there to sell this product. because Jones had just begun selling an iodine tincture that was, you know, sold to help people protect themselves against radiation. And then conveniently, we were sitting on this trip where we were told, you know, half the country was in danger of being exposed to it. It was that first moment where I realized maybe, maybe our job isn't to tell the truth.

16:03And in your book, you write that you became, quote, a seasoned bullshit artist devoid of conscience. And we shouldn't gloss over the serious misinformation that you broadcast, that you helped to broadcast. Because while you were behind the camera, InfoWars was spreading lies about Ebola. You filed a report which claimed that a mosque was actually a secret ISIS base. You went to an anti-abortion protest with Alex Jones in which he and supporters waved placards reading, Planned Parenthood is the KKK. But there is one particular story I would like you to tell us, which is all about when you were dispatched to the U.S.-Mexico border to stand up some nonsense about ISIS terrorists waltzing across to Texas without being stopped.

16:43Yeah, well, a Judicial Watch report was released that said that there were ISIS terror cells across the border. Joan sent us there to cover this. When we got there, there was nothing to show. There was nothing to talk about. So we get a call from a news producer that says, where are the videos? Where are the reports? And I think it was just this moment where I was so frustrated that I said, what do you want us to do? There's nothing to talk about. What do you want us to dress up as an ISIS terrorist and walk across the border to show that it's open? And he said, let me call you back. And a few minutes later, he called us back and he said, yeah, that's a great idea to do that.

17:27And I was like, what's a great idea? He was like, your idea. That's a great idea. I'm going to send you an ISIS flag. I'm going to send you a costume. And you're going to do that. The news producer stenciled an ISIS flag. He got a severed head from a prop shop in Austin, a scimitar sword, and the whole get up. And he mailed it to us. And so we started going to the border, trying to find a spot where we could just do this really quickly. But there was nowhere to do it. So you couldn't just nip over the border. There was no big hole in the fence or anything, though. No, no, no, there wasn't. Not where we were in El Paso.

18:05And so like a mirage, we were just driving and all of a sudden we saw this little stream that looks similar to the Rio Grande. And just in our desperation, we found our way down to that stream. The reporter I was with dressed up as an ISIS terrorist. I crossed over the little stream and I filmed him coming over. With the severed head. With the severed head. Thank you, Obama, for leaving your southern borders open so ISIS can terrorize America. We claim this land for surreal law. And almost immediately, it got millions of views. Jones went on his show and said, this is one of the most important things we've ever done.

18:48Get your family, get your friends to tune in. We're showing you the truth, the reality of what's going on in the world. And none of it was true. None of it was real. The terrorists are now one step closer to their endgame, stripping us of all our liberties. So we dress up like an ISIS jihadi to be as obvious as possible, to show and to illustrate just how wide open the border really is. The viewers knew that it wasn't a real terrorist. But what the lie was is that our border is so open and porous that it could happen in broad daylight. But here's the important part of that. Jones didn't know that that wasn't true.

19:25We lied. We are the ones that told a lie about where we were and what we were crossing over. And to me, that's sort of the point of that whole story, is that Jones creates this manipulative world and this manipulative environment. But he also creates this space around him where people are willing to do that. And how do you feel when you reflect on that? Ashamed. Horrified. I get the same sick feeling in my stomach I got on that day. It's just now it's for a different reason. There were times 100 % where I knew what I was doing was wrong. And yet I continued to do it. We started spreading lies on trips.

20:05We would leave details out that went against Jones's narrative framework. We would make claims that weren't true. And so when I say that I became a seasoned bullshit artist devoid of conscience, I mean, it's just true. It's just what it looked like being in Jones's world.

20:32Coming up, how Alex Jones lost the war and what The Onion has planned for his fallen empire.

20:52I'm Kai Wright. I'm Kari Sherman. And we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have, I know you have, where, you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face. with a fire hose of news, right? There's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is burning. I could go on and on and on. And on and on and on. But we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? How do you manage it? I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic?

21:28And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it? And who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about? So that's our mission. That's the show. Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Guardian. We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting. We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Kai and Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting May 13th. Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen.

22:01let's talk about sandy hook of the many despicable conspiracy theories that alex jones has propagated sandy hook is i think easily the worst and this was a year before you started working info wars but it's something that he was repeating over and over again including when you were there why did you stand for that and what did you make of of his lies I don't even, it wasn't even on my radar when Jones started saying that, which to me is the craziest part of it from my perspective. As a listener of his show, I didn't hear, I mean, I had to have heard him say that. I don't remember hearing him say that.

22:42What I remember specifically is the Boston Marathon bombing. He said that that was a false flag. He said that that was, you know, that some of those people were actors and some of those people didn't die. And every time there was a mass casualty or a tragedy, Jones claimed that it was a false flag. That was the perennial response. Blue screen, green screens. But it took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake. I mean, even I couldn't believe it. I knew they jumped on it, used the crisis, hyped it up. But then I did deep research and my gosh, it just pretty much didn't happen.

23:22And when he says false flag, what does he mean by that? Essentially, he means that our government had a hand in making sure that happened so that they could push an agenda. For Sandy Hook, Jones claimed that it was to take away firearms, was to create an incident that was so horrific that people would finally agree to give up their second amendment. That's the idea in a nutshell. You know, his story with that shifted constantly. It was maybe there were kids that died. No, there weren't kids that died. Maybe there are real families. No, there aren't, you know, but at the end of the day, those families had to deal with the worst thing that a human being could go through.

24:06I mean, it's up there. And Jones just twisted the knife. Jones just made it worse. And I said earlier that he, he, he was a, he had no value for truth and that, you know, that a lot of it was BS. I think Sandy Hook is something deeper and something different. I don't think he cares. I just don't think he has any concern about how his rhetoric affects anyone outside of himself. Of all of the people saying that we faked this and that it never happened and that she's still alive somewhere, God, if she were, wouldn't that be amazing? But she wasn't. It wasn't just his words, right? It was after suffering an unimaginable loss, These families, these parents, then faced years of severe harassment from Alex Jones' fans.