Alex Jones
Alexander Emerick Jones is an American far-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts The Alex Jones Show from Austin, Texas. The Alex Jones Show is the longest-running online news and politics talk show; it was previously broadcast by the Genesis Communications Network across the United States via syndicated and internet radio. He is the founder of Infowars and Banned.Video, websites that promote conspiracy theories and fake news.
Among many other conspiracy theories, Jones has alleged that the United States government either concealed information about or outright falsified the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the 1969 Moon landing. He has also claimed that several governments and large businesses have colluded to create a globalist "New World Order" through "manufactured economic crises, sophisticated surveillance tech and—above all—inside-job terror attacks that fuel exploitable hysteria". Jones has provided a platform for white nationalists and neo-Nazis on his website Banned.Video, as well as providing an "entry point" to their ideology. In 2023, leaked texts from Jones's phone revealed that he had created the website National File to evade social media bans on Infowars content.
A longtime critic of Republican and Democratic foreign and security policy, Jones supported Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid and continued to support him as a savior from an alleged criminal bipartisan cabal controlling the federal government, despite also falling out with Trump over several of his policies, including airstrikes against the Assad regime. A staunch supporter of Trump's re-election, Jones also supported the attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. On January 6, 2021, Jones was a speaker at the rally in Lafayette Square Park supporting Trump that preceded the latter's supporters' attack on the US Capitol.
In October 2022, for Jones's defamatory falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting, juries in Connecticut and Texas awarded a total of $1.487 billion in damages from Jones to a first responder and families of victims; the plaintiffs alleged that Jones's lies led to them being threatened and harassed for years. Following three more years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Jones's appeal without comment. On December 2, 2022, Jones filed for personal bankruptcy.
Early life and influences
Alexander Emerick Jones was born on February 11, 1974, in Dallas, Texas, and was raised in Rockwall, 25 miles east of Dallas. His father was a dentist from Austin and his mother was a homemaker. He says he has English, German, Scottish, and Irish descent. The family moved to Austin in Jones's second year of high school. He attended Anderson High School, where he played football and graduated in 1993. After graduating, Jones briefly attended Austin Community College before dropping out.As a teenager, he read None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a book by John Birch Society conspiracy theorist Gary Allen, which alleged global bankers, rather than elected officials, controlled American politics. It had a profound influence on him, and Jones has described Allen's work as "the easiest-to-read primer on The New World Order".
Waco siege and Oklahoma bombing
The Waco siege at the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, had an impact on Jones. It ended in April 1993, near the end of Jones's senior year of high school, with a substantial fire and a significant number of fatalities. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these events "only confirmed his belief in the inexorable progress of unseen, malevolent forces". It was at this time he started to host a call-in show on public access television in Austin.The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, was intended by perpetrator Timothy McVeigh as a response to the federal involvement in the botched resolution of the Waco siege on its second anniversary. Jones began accusing the federal government of having caused it: "I understood there's a kleptocracy working with psychopathic governments—clutches of evil that know the tricks of control". He did not believe the bombing had been the responsibility of McVeigh and his associate Terry Nichols.
In 1998, Jones organized a successful campaign to build a new Branch Davidian church as a memorial to those who died during the 1993 fire. He often discussed the project on his public-access television program. He claimed that David Koresh and his followers were peaceful people who were murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms during the siege.
Early broadcasting career
Jones began his career in Austin working on a live, call-in format public-access cable television program. In 1996, Jones switched to radio, hosting a show named The Final Edition on KJFK. Influenced by radio host William Cooper, who phoned in to Jones's early shows, Jones began to broadcast about the New World Order conspiracy theory at this time.While running for Congress, Ron Paul was a guest on his show several times. In 1999, Jones tied with Shannon Burke for that year's poll of "Best Austin Talk Radio Host", as voted by readers of The Austin Chronicle. Later that year, he was fired from KJFK-FM for refusing to broaden his topics. The station's operations manager said that Jones's views made it difficult for the station to sell advertising. Jones said:
''InfoWars''
In 1999, Jones founded with his then-wife Kelly Jones the website InfoWars, initially as a mail-order outlet for the sale of their conspiracy-oriented videos. Jones used the company to release films, such as America Destroyed by Design and America Wake Up Or Waco. Over time, InfoWars, with Jones as its publisher and director, became a prominent fake news website centered on promoting conspiracy theories. In November 2016, the InfoWars website received approximately 10 million visits, making its reach more extensive than mainstream news websites such as The Economist and Newsweek. Another of Jones's websites is PrisonPlanet.com.''The Alex Jones Show''
After his firing from KJFK-FM, Jones began to broadcast his own show by Internet connection from his home. In July 2000, a group of Austin Community Access Center radio hosts claimed that Jones had used legal proceedings and ACAC policy to intimidate them or try to get their broadcasts removed. In 2001, Jones's radio show was syndicated on approximately 100 stations.On the day of the 9/11 attacks, Jones said on his radio show there was a "98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing". He began promoting the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration was behind the attack. As a result, several stations dropped Jones's program, according to columnist Will Bunch. Jones became a leading figure of the "9/11 truther" cause. In 2010, the show attracted around two million listeners each week. According to Alexander Zaitchik of Rolling Stone magazine, in 2011 Jones had a larger on-line audience than Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh combined. In 2020, The Alex Jones Show was syndicated nationally by the Genesis Communications Network to more than 100 AM and FM radio stations in the United States.
According to journalist Will Bunch, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, the show has a demographic that leans more towards younger listeners than do other conservative pundits, due to Jones's "highly conspiratorial tone and Web-oriented approach". Bunch also stated that Jones "feed on the deepest paranoia".
Jones told The Washington Post in November 2016 that his radio show, then syndicated to 129 stations, had a daily audience of five million listeners and his video streams had topped 80 million viewers in a single month.
Jones's syndicator, Genesis Communications Network, announced its shutdown effective May 5, 2024, citing financial losses. The owners plan to migrate Jones's show, and others, to other networks.
Website, own-brand and endorsed products
According to court testimony Jones delivered in 2014, InfoWars then had revenues of over $20 million a year.A 2017 piece for German magazine Der Spiegel by Veit Medick indicated that two-thirds of Jones's funds derive from sales of his own products. These products are marketed through the InfoWars website and through advertising spots on Jones's show. They include dietary supplements, toothpaste, bulletproof vests and "brain pills", which hold "an appeal for anyone who believes Armageddon is near", according to Medick. From September 2015 to the end of 2018, the InfoWars store made $165 million in sales, according to court filings relating to the Sandy Hook lawsuits filed against Jones.
In August 2017, Californian medical company Labdoor, Inc reported on tests applied to six of Jones's dietary supplement products. These included a product named Survival Shield, which was found by Labdoor to contain only iodine, and a product named Oxy-Powder, which comprised a compound of magnesium oxide and citric acid—common ingredients in dietary supplements. Labdoor indicated no evidence of prohibited or harmful substances, but cast doubt on the marketing claims for these products, and asserted that the quantity of the ingredients in certain products would be "too low to be appropriately effective".
On a 2017 segment of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver stated that Jones spends "nearly a quarter" of his on-air time promoting products sold on his website, many of which are purported solutions to medical and economic problems claimed to be caused by the conspiracy theories described on his show.
Research commissioned in 2017 by the Center for Environmental Health determined that two products sold by Jones contained potentially dangerous levels of the heavy metal lead.
Jones continued his promotion of supplements during the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Jones was issued a cease and desist from the Attorney General of New York, after he claimed, in the absence of any evidence, that products he sold, including colloidal silver toothpaste, were an effective treatment for COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration also sent him a letter on April 9, 2020, warning that the federal government might proceed to seize the products he was marketing for COVID-19 or fine him if he continued to sell them. A disclaimer then appeared on Jones's website, stating his products were not intended for treating "the novel coronavirus". On a linked page, Jones was quoted: "They plan on, if they've fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerized you with the TV and put you in a trance, on killing you". Jones continued to sell the products.
According to leaked text messages from Jones's mobile phone, InfoWars sold VasoBeet, a product it described as a "powerful beet formula", at a 900% retail markup as of September 2019. On January 29, 2020, InfoWars pulled in $245,000 in food sales, a day after Jones stoked fear about food shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in a broadcast.
During the April 2022 InfoWars bankruptcy hearing, Jones's representative stated, "InfoWars is a prominent trademark in the conspiracy theory community and Alex Jones is equally as prominent". He added that Jones's name was the "Coca-Cola of the conspiracy theory community".
In 2023, Jones launched a new subscription-based podcast, Alex Jones Live. It was put on hold shortly after it began due to matters relating to his Sandy Hook case.