The Infowars founder and Trump backer is as much marketer as ideological warrior, selling products to assuage the fears he is so expert at stoking.
AUSTIN — More than ever before in his two-decade career built on baseless conspiracy theories, angry nativist rants and end-of-days fearmongering, Alex Jones is being called to account.
In a Texas courthouse, his lawyers are battling defamation claims resulting from one of his most infamous acts: spreading false reports that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 first graders and six adults was an elaborate hoax.
In Silicon Valley, Facebook, YouTube and, as of Thursday, Twitter, under pressure to better curb hate speech and incendiary misinformation, have largely cut him off. His latest stunt — turning up on Capitol Hill this week to call attention to his claim that he is being unfairly silenced on ideological grounds — led to an embarrassing rebuff by a conservative Republican senator.
The big question for him now is whether his bluster — and the implicit support he has received from President Trump, who has channeled bogus or misleading claims promoted by Mr. Jones and echoed his complaints of anticonservatism by technology companies — will be sufficient to see him past his current peril. He is facing a legal, public opinion and social media reckoning that poses the most serious threat yet not just to his ability to inject the outlandish into the mainstream, but also to the lucrative business he has built.
Mr. Jones likes to portray his digital channel, Infowars, as a media outlet, and he is quick to wrap himself in the First Amendment. But in business terms, it is more accurate to describe Infowars as an online store that uses Mr. Jones’s commentary to move merchandise. Its revenue comes primarily from the sale of a grab-bag of health-enhancement and survivalist products that Mr. Jones hawks constantly.
A close look at his career shows that he has been as much a canny if unconventional entrepreneur as an ideological agitator. He has adapted to — and profited from — changes in both the political climate and the media business even as he has tested, and regularly crossed, the boundaries of acceptable public discourse.
For more than two decades, Mr. Jones, who is 44, has built a substantial following appealing to an angry, largely white, majority male audience that can choose simply to be entertained or to internalize his rendering of their worst fears: that the government and other big institutions are out to get them, that some form of apocalypse is frighteningly close and that they must become more virile, and better-armed, to survive.
“I’m not a business guy, I’m a revolutionary,” he said in an interview in August.
If it is a revolution, it is one that he has skillfully monetized. His fundamental insight was that his audience is also a nearly captive market for the variety of goods he peddles via Infowars’ website and his syndicated radio show — products intended to assuage the same fears he stokes.
Infowars and its affiliated companies are private and do not have to report financial results publicly. But by 2014, according to testimony Mr. Jones gave in a court case, his operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue. Records viewed by The New York Times show that most of his revenue that year came from the sale of products like supplements such as the Super Male Vitality, which purports to boost testosterone, or Brain Force Plus, which promises to “supercharge” cognitive functions.
Court records in a divorce case show that Mr. Jones’s businesses netted more than $5 million in 2014. Court proceedings show that he and his then-wife, Kelly Jones, embarked on plans to build a swimming pool complex around that time featuring a waterfall and dining cabana with a stone fireplace. Mr. Jones bought four Rolex watches in one day in 2014, and spent $40,000 on a saltwater aquarium; the couple’s assets at the time included a $70,000 grand piano, $50,000 in firearms and $752,000 in silver, gold and precious metals, in a safe deposit box, court documents say.
People who have worked with him or studied his business said his revenues had probably continued to grow in recent years.
But his problems are mounting. At least five defamation suits against Mr. Jones, including three filed by Sandy Hook families, are moving forward. Last month, a Texas judge ordered Mr. Jones and officers in his web of limited-liability companies to provide depositions to lawyers for the parent of a Sandy Hook victim in coming weeks, testimony that could shed new light on Mr. Jones’ operation.
He is also facing complaints of workplace discrimination from two ex-employees, a fraud and product liability case and a nasty court battle with Ms. Jones, now his ex-wife. She says that the couple have spent a combined $4 million on their four-year battle over custody of their three children and disputes over the business.
At the same time, the crackdown on Mr. Jones in August by the social media giants — he has been largely banned by Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and even Pinterest — poses a severe test by limiting his access to his audience. The early evidence is that the bans have substantially reduced his reach, and that was before Twitter imposed a permanent ban on Thursday on his account and the account for Infowars, depriving him of his last major social media channel.
As a result, he is being forced to rely even more on his Infowars site, his mobile app and his radio show, which is heard on more than 100 stations nationwide.
True to form, Mr. Jones is using the challenge to move more product.
For several days in August, after the ban by the social media companies, his online Infowars Store offered deep discounts under an all-caps banner that read, “FIGHT THE BULLIES, SAVE THE INTERNET, SAVE INFOWARS.”
The best-selling Survival Shield X-2 nascent iodine drops were discounted 40 percent, to $23.95, while Alpha Power, a product marketed as boosting testosterone and vitality to “push back in the fight against the globalist agenda,” was half off, at $34.95.
“The enemy wants to cut off our funding to destroy us,” Mr. Jones said on his broadcast, concluding a segment about being banned by the social media companies with a sales pitch for another product. “If you don’t fund us, we’ll be shut down.”
Mr. Jones operates from behind bulletproof glass at an Austin industrial park, in a dimly lit hive of studios and cluttered, open-plan desks. He invited a New York Times reporter there for an interview on two conditions: that the location of his headquarters not be specified and that he would record audio of the interview.
There are no identifying signs outside. Inside, there are split-screen security camera monitors throughout, which Mr. Jones checks as he passes by. There are guns in the building for protection, he said. He added that armed snipers are positioned on the roof, then in a phone call the next day said that he had made that up. He wouldn’t say how many employees he has, but in 2017 court testimony he said he employed 75 people, plus 10 contractors.
Mr. Jones talked for nearly three hours, bouncing around the room, raising his voice, feigning menace, replaying themes and entire riffs from his show.
“I am here giving you the unfiltered truth of my soul,” he said.
He insisted that his troubles are proof that a globalist, leftist cabal aims to silence him.
He claimed advance knowledge that technology companies, Chinese communists, Democrats and the mainstream media would “try to use me as a 2018,2020 campaign issue — to hurt Trump, to misrepresent what I’ve said, to project it on Trump, and to go after the First Amendment and legitimize the censorship of all the Republican congresspeople.”
It was classic Alex Jones: a nonstop mix of flimsy fact, grievance, paranoia, ideology, combativeness and solipsism.
Mr. Jones often exhorts his listeners to “investigate” the hoaxes and theories he advances, pleas that may have inspired criminal acts by some of his followers.
In 2000,Mr. Jones and his cameraman, Mike Hanson, infiltrated Bohemian Grove, an annual camping retreat for global business and political leaders near Monte Rio, Calif. The pair shot dim video of a pyrotechnic spectacle that Mr. Jones wrongly claimed was an “occult ritual.”
Early in 2002, a heavily armed man entered the grounds and set a fire. Citing Mr. Jones’ reports, he said he was convinced that child abuse and human sacrifices were taking place at the retreat.
A similar scenario unfolded more than a decade later, when during the 2016 campaign Mr. Jones helped spread the “Pizzagate” hoax, that Hillary Clinton and Democratic operatives were running a child sex ring from a pizzeria in Washington, D. C.
An Infowars listener, Edgar Maddison Welch, entered the pizzeria in late 2016 armed with a military-style rifle to investigate and rescue children he believed were being held captive, firing the gun inside the restaurant as patrons fled. He is serving a four-year jail term.
Mr. Jones for years spread the false claim that the Sandy Hook shooting was a fraud, and that the victims’ relatives were actors in a hoax planned by government “gun grabbers.”
In 2015, after Leonard Pozner, whose son Noah died at Sandy Hook, got one of Mr. Jones’ Sandy Hook hoax broadcasts removed from YouTube, Mr. Jones showed viewers Mr. Pozner’s personal information, and maps to addresses associated with his family, according to court documents.
Lucy Richards, an avowed Infowars listener, subsequently went to prison for issuing repeated death threats against Mr. Pozner. The Pozner family lives in hiding, and is suing Mr. Jones for defamation.
On Father’s Day 2017,Mr. Jones went on Infowars in a brief broadcast to offer the Sandy Hook parents “my sincere condolences” for the loss of their children in “the horrible tragedy” in Newtown, Conn. He said he wanted to “open a dialogue” with the families because it was essential for the nation to come together rather than “letting the MSM misrepresent things,” referring to the mainstream media.
In the Times interview, Mr. Jones suggested that blame for the pain of the Sandy Hook families rests not with him but with the media and inconsistencies in coverage of the shooting.
“I was covering a giant phenomenon of people not believing media anymore because they’ve been caught in governments’ lying so much,” he said.
Alex Jones grew up in a conservative, upper-middle-class family in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, the son of a dentist.
There was nothing particularly unusual about him during those days, except a conspiratorial nature and, from high school on, as he put it in court testimony, a commitment to “seeking out ways to get on air.
