The lasting impact of Alex Jones is difficult to fully wrap your head around. Undoubtedly, he is one of the most influential American broadcasters of all time and played a major part in the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking in American politics. He was the man who suggested that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. The government is putting chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay. Fluoride is being used to pacify the population and turn them into brain dead zombies.
Alex Jones was the man who broke America’s collective brain. He was a big part of the breakdown of consensus reality in America. Even the people who didn’t necessarily watch his show or take the things he said seriously have been affected. His influence can be felt everywhere.
Of course, one of his most infamous moments was calling the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting a false flag, supposedly done for the purposes of promoting gun control legislation. At the time, such a statement was unthinkable. He was brutally maligned by every respectable person in American politics, and they were right to drag him through the mud. This began a years long fallout where his followers would stalk, harass, and defame the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims — suggesting that they were all crisis actors. All of this culminated in three lawsuits that racked up an astonishing $1.3 billion in judgments against him, which eventually led Info Wars to shutter its doors.
Alex Jones has changed America’s political culture so much that such a conspiracy would hardly be a blip on the radar in today’s media landscape. We could look at all of the internet theories that circulated in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year as an example. Right wing media personality Candace Owens in particular has posited multiple explanations for Kirk’s assassination that defy the official narrative presented by the FBI and legacy media. She has suggested that Israel may have had Charlie killed. That Tyler Robinson is innocent. That Charlie had to be taken out so Donald Trump could start a war with Iran. She has even implied that Charlie’s widow, Erika, might’ve had a hand in killing her late husband.
This is just one case study that shows the downstream effect Info Wars has had on the political zeitgeist. Alex Jones fell on his sword during the Sandy Hook trials so someone like Candace Owens could carry on the fight and take the war on information to unprecedented heights. These days you encounter people all over the political spectrum that are susceptible to magical explanations that fill in the gaps of their understanding (just take a scroll through Twitter). To some people, everything is a conspiracy. Nothing is as it seems. It’s all being manipulated by bad actors with an agenda.
Many tried to suggest that Trump wasn’t really shot in the ear in Butler Pennsylvania. Rather, it was staged to rally support for his 2024 presidential campaign. January 6 (which Alex Jones attended) was infiltrated by antifa super soldiers trying to goad the otherwise peaceful MAGA crowd into rioting at the Capitol building. The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was an astroturfed SPLC honey pot. Even the most recent assassination attempt against Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was said by many BlueSky users to be a false flag intended to generate public support for his ballroom addition to the White House. Are these conspiracies not similarly distasteful to the suggestion that no one died in the Sandy Hook shooting? Surely Candace’s suggestion that Erika Kirk took part in killing her own husband deserves a comparable level of condemnation? It probably does, but times have changed.
Conspiratorial thinking is nothing new in American politics, but what interests me is the way conspiracies have become a political tool. MAGA in particular has learned to harness the public’s distrust for legacy media to craft any narrative they would like. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that Alex Jones interviewed Trump during the 2016 election. Trump understood even at that time that Alex had a large audience of rubes that he could draw support from if he was willing to lean into their crackpot nonsense.
Consider the ways Trump has used conspiracy theories to exercise political power. He has said time and time again that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — an idea endorsed by Jones himself. Right wing conspiracy figures latch on to this claim as a call to action, and suddenly new theories start to take form. Dinesh D’Souza got behind the stolen election theory and released a documentary called 2000 Mules, which claimed that paid “mules” were collecting illegal ballots in swing states and depositing them in mail boxes. Pillow tycoon Mike Lindell did a 72 hour cyber symposium where he attempted to present evidence of fraudulent voting machines that handed Joe Biden a victory in the electoral college. This generated so much fuss in MAGA world that they rioted at the Capitol building in 2021, only for many of them to be arrested and later pardoned by the very man who called on them to #StopTheSteal.
We could also look at the case of Nick Shirley’s video about supposedly fraudulent Somali daycare centers in Minnesota. At the time ICE was carrying out Operation Metro Surge at the direction of President Trump, which predominantly targeted Minnesota’s large Somali population. In the midst of the heightened immigration enforcement, Shirley went to Somali run daycare centers with a camera crew in tow and asked to look around inside the buildings to verify that there were actually children there. When he was refused access, it was taken by many as irrefutable evidence that there were no children at these facilities, and that the buildings were simply being used as a front to milk government childcare funds under the guise that they were running a legitimate daycare business. Shirley’s video was boosted on Twitter with the full endorsement of Elon Musk and accrued over 135 million views. If you were on Twitter at that time, you probably saw that video shared dozens if not hundreds of times. This video was used to manufacture consent for the government’s immigration surge. Pretty soon A.I. videos started circulating on Twitter of Somali immigrants having their luxury sports cars repossessed by ICE. Other viral A.I. videos showed ICE protestors assaulting elderly white women for seemingly no reason. These videos would almost always get hit with a community note within a couple hours, but when you look at the replies, it doesn’t seem like the community notes are able to persuade anyone who wants to be fooled. And of course, while all of this was being processed through American media, Shirley made an appearance on Info Wars to discuss his viral video.
It’s worth admitting Alex Jones was partially correct in his overall worldview. The government really is run by drug addled pedophiles and elite sickos. The government really is kicking in people’s doors and hauling them away without due process. Manufactured media hysteria is being used as a justification to rollback civil liberties. The sad irony for Alex is that when his prophecy came true, he found himself on the other side of the fence, defending the very things that he spent years warning us about. When Elon Musk took to Twitter to publicly accuse Trump of being in the Epstein files, Alex went to great lengths to exonerate Trump, even when the very limited information we were getting from the Epstein disclosures implicated Trump beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. Alex Jones defended Trump’s immigration operations in Chicago last year — praising the brave ICE agents as they supposedly repelled wave after wave of coordinated antifa attacks on the Broadview ICE Facility. In this sense, Alex Jones became apart of the mainstream media, defending the regime from criticism. It seems like the Iran war was the breaking point for Alex, where he could no longer make excuses for the President, and in late March/early April Alex made it clear he was no longer on the Trump train. He suggested that Trump was being manipulated by bad actors within the administration, and that the Trump presidency that he fought and bled for was no more. Last month Trump denounced Alex as well as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson with a post on Truth Social, effectively casting them out of the MAGA movement.
Then, on April 30 2026, Alex did his final broadcast on Info Wars. He was compelled to sell off assets related to Info Wars to pay the Sandy Hook families. Now the branding of Info Wars is being licensed by The Onion to turn it into a mockery of its former self (if such a thing is even possible). Alex has moved to a new studio and has rebranded his broadcasting business as “The Alex Jones Network”. Even though he will carry on the fight, you can see in his face that he is a thoroughly defeated man. At best, he is a shell of his former self. But even with Info Wars gone, we are stuck living in the media landscape that Alex helped create — and in that sense, he will be with us forever.
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