As the relationship between Donald Trump and MAGA media continues to sour, the former president hasn’t held back in labeling prominent right-wing voices as “losers,” “troublemakers,” and “nut jobs.”
Amidst these verbal clashes, a new book delves into the chaotic world of one of the far-right’s most notorious figures, Alex Jones, and his Infowars platform. The book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous environment surrounding these controversial media operations.
In his new memoir, Josh Owens, who spent four years working on video production for the infamous conspiracy theorist, reveals the truth behind the sensationalism. “It was nonsense, it was lies,” Owens candidly writes.
Owens’s memoir, The Madness of Believing, documents a series of elaborate stunts orchestrated by Jones. These include creating unnecessary panic about supposed nuclear threats on California beaches and faking an incident where Jones was allegedly barred from voting in the 2016 elections.
The book guides readers through the painstaking process of fabricating a video that purportedly showed a member of the Islamic State sneaking into the United States from Mexico with a severed human head, highlighting the lengths to which Jones would go to disseminate his narrative.
The book, released Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing, details claims of Jones’s drunken outbursts, verbal tirades, and times when he allegedly punched and even accidentally shot a gun toward his employees, later insisting he was just joking.
Owens also recounts something far more personal – how easy it was to get sucked into Jones’s vortex of paranoia and fear-mongering, and how hard it was to extricate himself from it and come to terms with his role in Infowars’ deceptions.
‘I was struggling with how I’d spent the last four years of my life. The scams I’d contributed to. The lies I’d helped spread. The people I’d harmed,’ he writes.
A former InfoWars staffer has detailed his experience working for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and shared his account of how the far-right radio host outright fabricates news
Josh Owens is lifting the lid in his new book, after spending four years (2013 to 2017) editing and producing videos for the notorious conspiracy theorist
‘The guilt clawed at me, insistent and unyielding. I had been a cog in a monstrous machine, a part of something I had once believed, in earnest, to be valiant.’
Infowars has not responded to the Daily Mail’s request for comment about the book.
Americans who are neither Infowars fans nor part of the MAGA movement fans might only know Jones, 52, as the deep-voiced, far-right radio host who insisted that the September 11 terror attacks were an inside job and claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
He was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages for defaming the families of Sandy Hook victims, and courts are still sorting out how that money will actually be paid.
Owens steers clear of both those stories in his book mainly because they happened before his stint at Infowars from 2013 to 2017 and so he wasn’t involved in the reporting.
Having been raised by evangelicals in the Bible Belt of northern Georgia, he explains why he lied on his resumé, dropped out of film school and moved nearly a thousand miles to Austin to become a warrior in Jones’s right-wing ideological warfare.
‘At 23, I was vulnerable, angry and searching for direction, so I decided to give it a shot,’ he writes.
The movie buff was lured not just by Jones’s right-wing politics, but by what he calls his ‘way of imbuing the world with mystery, adding a layer of cinematic verisimilitude.’
The Madness of Believing – published April 14 – details his four years inside Infowars, including claims of staged videos and fabricated news events
Alex Jones built a massive following with explosive on-air rants – but his former aide says much of it was built on fiction
‘The dullness of everyday existence parted to reveal a more vivid world beneath the surface,’ he writes about his first weeks on the job.
‘Suddenly I was no longer a bored, directionless kid staring at a computer screen.
‘I was Fox Mulder combing through the X-Files, Rod Serling opening a door to the Twilight Zone, Rosemary Woodhouse convinced that the neighbors were members of a ritualistic cult.’
He claims Jones had a penchant for day-drinking Grey Goose vodka out of Dixie Cups at the office and even kept the door to his personal restroom open, making ‘no attempt at discretion with his bowel movements.’
At one point, after Jones quickly married his new girlfriend when she got pregnant, then learned the unborn baby might have microcephaly, a rare condition giving it a smaller head than normal, he writes that his boss started wailing in a DC restaurant.
‘I’m going to have a kid with a… with a… with a peanut head!’ he describes Jones sobbing. ‘After a few minutes, his crying had slowed, but under his breath, like he couldn’t believe the unfairness, he kept muttering ‘peanut head…peanut head…peanut head…’
‘The very idea of personal space was alien in Jones’s world,’ writes Owens.
He describes Jones’s demands for a daily ‘churn and burn’ of endless video content — ‘quantity, not quality’ that stoked fears among his audience and leveraged those fears to sell his branded merchandise.
Jones, pictured after a 2022 court appearance, has previously been ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages over false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting
The far-right radio host infamously and falsely claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut – which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults – was a hoax
As Jones was peddling a supplement he touted as a ‘shield’ against radiation exposure, he assigned his video team to fuel panic about nuclear fallout from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster contaminating California beaches.
Owens says he couldn’t contain his rage when his video crew, roaming the Pacific coast with Geiger counters, was unable to come up with evidence to back up his conspiracy theory.
‘I felt angry, defensive, anxious, and fearful, but more than anything, I felt confused.
‘Something inside me was certain Jones wanted us to lie. To fabricate information to sell a product, to make money. But he never explicitly said this.
‘In all our conversations with him, he never said the words, “I want you to lie.” Instead, Jones had tricked us into examining our abilities, doubting our convictions and questioning our sanity.
‘If there was a word we needed to define and read aloud at that moment, it wasn’t “reporter.” It was “gaslight”,’ Owens writes.
He illustrates, step by disturbing step, the ways he fabricated news while working for Jones.
Like on Election Day 2016 when, knowing full well that video cameras weren’t allowed in polling places, Owens claims he drunkenly provoked election officials into telling his team to turn off their cameras as false proof that he was being kicked out for voting for Trump.
Owens also details Jones’s drunken outbursts, verbal tirades, and times when he punched and even accidentally shot a gun toward his employees, later insisting he was just joking
‘I don’t think Jones even intended to vote,’ Owens writes.
The most absurd stunt allegedly came when Jones was dead set on proving unsupported claims that ISIS had built a training base in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, close to the US border.
Given a lack of any evidence and the pressure Jones was putting on his team to find it, Owens admits to dressing a reporter to look like a terrorist carrying what appeared to be a bloody, severed head as he was filmed crossing a stream that Infowars falsely purported was a section of Rio Grande on the border.
The video snagged a million views overnight.
‘Jones never found out we lied. Though, given the numbers, I doubt he would have cared. I told myself it was part of the job, that I minimized risk while still getting the result he wanted,’ he writes.
‘What I didn’t acknowledge was that I’d become complicit in a new way. I’d given up on my supposed veneration of the truth.’
Owens stayed at Infowars partly, he says, because Jones kept promoting him and upping his pay.
He writes that he also stayed because Jones is a kind of centrifugal force – a charismatic, manipulative and abusive boss who commanded loyalty through domination and intimidation and responded to staffers’ doubts by labeling them as failures.
President Trump last week took aim at high-profile right-wing influencers, including Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson, branding them ‘losers,’ ‘troublemakers’ and ‘nut jobs’
In response, Jones shared an X post saying he has made ‘very clear’ he no longer supports the president
The book details Jones physically threatening his workers, allegedly demanding that staffers punch him, then punching them, drawing blood by hitting one and cracking the ribs of another.
‘Suck it up,’ Jones told that employee, Owens writes. ‘Quit acting like a baby.’
He also recounts a time when he claims Jones ordered his staff to meet him at a ranch to film ‘click-bait video of explosions and women wielding guns’.
He allegedly forced the crew’s lone female to join in, despite her reluctance, then picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in her and Owens’s direction.
To make matters worse, he pretended he had done it on purpose as a joke, treating the shaken staffer ‘like she was unhinged and humorless.’
‘Although I cringed, I remained silent; not just among the cowards, but very much a part of them,’ Owens writes.
‘As far as I could tell, Jones had no real friends in his life who weren’t beholden to him financially, and no relationships where the power dynamic wasn’t in his favor.
‘When he made mistakes, there was always someone there, if not many, to enable him.’
Owens conveys not just a loathing for his erratic boss, but for himself each month, week and day he stayed in Jones’s employment.
Just when he was about to leave, Jones doubled his salary. And just when he worked up the courage to apply for another job, he told himself that nobody would hire him with Infowars on his resumé.
It was the week of Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, when he writes he was filming a drunk Jones acting out attention-grabbing antics throughout DC, that Owens could no longer dismiss Jones’s behavior as mere eccentricities and excesses.
That’s when he finally decided not only to quit Infowars and write about his time there.
Be it in a moment of vulnerability or manipulation, he writes, Jones confided in him, ‘Let me tell you a little secret. I don’t want to do this anymore either.’
‘So I don’t blame you not wanting to stare into the abyss sometimes, ’cause you can become the abyss.’
