In terms of the audience he reaches, he also may be the one with the most far-reaching influence in the nation’s history. Time after time, he warns without any evidence that terrorist attacks — from 9/11 to the Boston Marathon bombings to the 2013 Washington Navy Yard mass murder — are actually “false flag” operations by our government or evil “globalist” forces planning to take over the world. To many, Jones is a bad joke. But the sad reality is that he has millions of followers who listen to his radio show, watch his “documentaries” and read his websites, and some of them, like Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, resort to deadly violence.

In his own words

"I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn't matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street, begging to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them! Do you understand?"

— CNN's “Piers Morgan Live,” Jan. 7, 2013

"Same-sex marriage is sold as a civil right. And I believe that people as individuals — I'm a libertarian — have the right to do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt others. And I'm not obsessed with the subject like people on different sides of the debate are. But clearly, from the eugenicist/globalist view, and they've written textbooks on it, you can look them up, they [the globalists] want to encourage the breakdown of the family, because the family is where people owe their allegiance. That's why they want to get rid of God. Not because they're atheists, but because they want the state to be God. And so they are taking the rights of an ancient, unified program of marriage and they are breaking it."

— YouTube interview, June 2013

"Then they'll release the big one, and they'll kill probably half the population of the United States. Folks, I'm telling you right now, I'm sure of it. They're going to stage terror attacks. I will be very surprised if they don't stage something by the end of this year."

— “Alex Jones Show,” Feb.13, 2009

“Humanity has got to get off-world. We need access to the life-extension technologies. Talk about discrimination, forget skin color. I want the advanced life-extension! I want to go to space! I want to see interdimensional travel! I want what God promised us and I won’t sit here and watch Satan steal it!”

— “Alex Jones Show,” March 16, 2016

“A lot of liberal women, as you know, the new thing is having a jihadi…There’s nothing sexier than a jihadi because it’s so fun to have him step on your head and kick you in the gut. Now, if the man treats you good and loves Jesus, he’s bad. But if he kicks you in the teeth and stomps on you, it’s liberal, it’s trendy, you go smoke hookah with him, and it’s fun.”

— “Alex Jones Show” Feb 8, 2016

“Obama is hardcore Wahhabist; he is al-Qaeda.”

— “Alex Jones Show” Jan 6, 2016

“We’re going to return the republic. We’ll never be perfect but my God we’re not going to keep babies alive and harvest their organs. We’re not going to sell their parts for women’s cosmetics. We’re not gonna have Pepsi with baby flavoring in it.”

— “Alex Jones Show” Dec 8, 2015

"I have deep context for every claim I make. I know some people say I exaggerate, but I believe everything I say. It's just that the denial is so strong, the apathy so deep, that people need something to shake them out of their morass. We're like flowers who naturally turn toward the sun, and the globalists want us turned toward Hollywood and the TV so they can poison us."

— Quoted in Rolling Stone, March 2011

Background

Dubbed "the most paranoid man in America" by Rolling Stone and the "king of conspiracy" by CNN, radio talk show host, “documentary”-maker and webmaster Alex Jones is notorious for epic rants about “New World Order” plots for world government, enforced eugenics, secret internment camps, militarized police and behind-the-scenes control by a global corporate cabal. In his estimation, the only way to avert this dystopian future is if true patriots resist before it is too late, and his tens of thousands of acolytes are taking heed, building bunkers, hoarding food and investing in precious metals – and, in some cases, resorting to violence.

His principal venues are “The Alex Jones Show,” which has approximately 2 million weekly listeners and is nationally syndicated on about 60 radio stations, and two conspiracy-themed websites, InfoWars.com (Alexa rank 330) and PrisonPlanet.com (Alexa rank 3,237). He also peddles an extensive line of self-produced videos, “documentaries” that purport to prove a whole array of conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, secret government concentration camps, and more.

The way Jones sees it, shadowy groups within the U.S. government orchestrated — or at least refrained from preventing — the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon massacre, the bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah federal building, and the mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. He has even suggested that President Obama was responsible for the 2013 Oklahoma tornado outbreak. When Jared Lee Loughner went on his January 2011 rampage in Tucson, Ariz., killing six people and severely wounding U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), Jones told Rolling Stone: “This whole thing stinks to high heaven. … My gut tells me this was a staged mind-control operation. The government employs geometric psychological-warfare experts that know exactly how to indirectly manipulate unstable people through the media.”

It later emerged that Loughner was a fan of a “Loose Change,” a video that Jones helped finance and acted as executive director for — and a gospel source for those who believe 9/11 was an inside job. A prolific filmmaker, Jones’s many videos carry highly alarming titles like “911: The Road to Tyranny,” “Police State 3: Total Enslavement,” “The Masters of Terror: Exposed,” “New World Order: Blueprint of Madmen” and “The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off.”

Born in Dallas, Texas., on Feb. 11, 1974, Jones by his own account had a typical suburban upbringing in a home where his father was a dentist and his mother a homemaker. He attended Austin's Anderson High School, played football, smoked pot, and did a lot of reading. One of the most influential books from his teenage years was None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a book by John Birch PR representative Gary Allen, that Jones still cites as "the quintessential primer to understand the New World Order." Published in 1972, the book sold 5 million copies and laid out a scenario in which international bankers financed the communist revolution in Russia in something akin to a lab experiment. Flushed with that success, the bankers moved to the next phase: imposing global government, centralized monetary policies, income taxes and mass social welfare programs that would keep the populace dependant and subservient. To Jones, and a sizable chunk of other disenfranchised, paranoid souls, the book's logic-leaping premise made perfect sense.

Near the end of Jones' senior year in high school, events were unfolding that only confirmed his belief in the inexorable progress of unseen, malevolent forces. A hundred miles from Austin, the federal siege of the Branch Davidian cultists’ compound hear in Waco, Texas., ended in a tragic April 1993 firestorm. The events in Waco had a galvanizing effect on Jones. Dropping out of Austin Community College, he began hosting a viewer call-in show on Austin's public access television (PACT/ACTV), where he honed the bombastic style that has since become his trademark.

Soon enough, there was more “evidence” of a tyrannical takeover, when Oklahoma City's Murrah Building was leveled by bomber Timothy McVeigh in April 1995, killing 168 people, in retribution for the deaths of the Waco cultists. Jones simply could not accept that McVeigh was a fellow "patriot." As Esquire Magazine noted in an August 2013 profile, Jones claimed he had "interviewed people who said they'd seen Timothy McVeigh planting explosives with a military escort and cops who mysteriously died after telling him the government did it. Just like the Reichstag! And there was a bombing drill that morning!"

In 1996, Jones moved to Austin's KJFK-FM to host a show called “The Final Edition,” where he warned of impending martial law and banged the drum to rebuild the Branch Davidian compound as a memorial to those he said were "murdered" by Attorney General Janet Reno and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The show lasted until 1999, when, according to The Austin Chronicle, he was fired because his views made it difficult to attract sponsors despite high ratings and winning the Chronicle's “Best Austin Talk Radio Host” reader poll that year.

Jones barely skipped a beat. He set up an ISDN line in his house, and began life as an independent (long before Glenn Beck did the same thing), broadcasting via InfoWars.com and syndicated nationwide by Genesis Communications to AM, FM, and shortwave stations. His reach grew quickly, and syndication soon verged on 100 stations. But when 9/11 took place, Jones' tendency to go off the rails was too much, and cancellations poured in. "I went on the air and said, 'Those were controlled demolitions," he told Rolling Stone. "You just watched the government blow up the World Trade Center. I lost 70 percent of my affiliates that day. Station managers asked me, 'Do you want to be on this crusade going nowhere, or do you want to be a star?' I'm proud I never compromised."

While this style plays well with his acolytes, it has notably failed in several high-profile media appearances. During a January 2013 gun control discussion with CNN's Piers Morgan following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Jones practically foamed at the mouth while shouting Morgan down.

Invited on the show partly as a result of his online petition to deport Morgan, a British citizen, because of Morgan’s support for a nationwide ban on military-style assault weapons, Jones was unrelenting from the start. He dove into a rambling diatribe involving Stalin, Hitler, Mao, black helicopters, megabanks, rape in India, and psychologists who overprescribe drugs. "I'm here to tell you," he literally shouted, "1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn't matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street, begging to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them! Do you understand?"

The cringe-worthy performance was widely panned by observers on the right as well as the left. Archrival Glenn Beck called Jones a "madman" during his own radio show on Jan. 12, 2013. "Piers Morgan is trying to have gun control," said Beck. "He is trying to make everybody who has guns and who believes in the Second Amendment to be a deterrent to an out-of-control government look like a madman. So now he immediately books the madman and makes him look like a conservative. He’s not a conservative!"

Several months later, in June 2013, an unchastened Jones was at it again during a discussion on the BBC's “Sunday Politics” show about the Bilderberg Group, which was having its annual meeting in Watford, United Kingdom, and is one of Jones' prime villains in the globalist financial conspiracy. As the segment ended with Jones once again shouting at the top of his lungs, exasperated presenter Andrew Neil proclaimed, “You are the worst person I have ever interviewed,” and "We have an idiot on the show today," while twirling his fingers around his ear.

Such meltdowns do little to advance Jones' cause with a mainstream audience. But in his view, most of this audience consists of consumerist "sheeple" who don't think for themselves. He believes that he is speaking truth to power, galvanizing the “sheeple” into joining enlightened liberty-loving patriots (his audience) in opposing the growing tyranny. It's a classic come-on: I know something you don't. Jones manipulates the psychological fears of the vulnerable into complete acceptance of nearly anything he says – regardless of how loony it may be. Wrapping himself in the American flag (the people's flag, not the government's), he invokes Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as his icons.

An unsuccessful Republican candidate for a Texas House seat in 2000, Jones describes himself as a libertarian who stands apart from the "bogus political labels of left and right." He views himself as an "aggressive constitutionalist," defending individual liberties, the Bill of Rights, property rights, and the security of U.S. borders against illegal immigrant hordes being ushered in by evil forces bent on destroying our society. Regarding illegal immigrants, he was quoted by Esquire saying: "They're here to give corporations subsidized low wages — because they can't live on the low wages they get, so they give them the welfare, and that's designed to give the big corporations an unfair trading advantage. They're using poverty as a tool of control."

And while Jones disavows racism, he sometimes walks a fine line in his pronouncements. In August 2011, he featured an article on Infowars that called the Department of Homeland Security’s “If you see something, say something” terrorism-awareness campaign a racist conspiracy to “characterize predominantly white, middle class, politically engaged Americans as domestic extremists.”

The program, which actually encourages people to consider “behavior, rather than appearance” when considering whether to report suspicious activity, entailed a series of public service announcements designed to drive home that point. What piqued Jones was a videotaped 10-minute public service announcement in which most of the “terrorists” are white, while the citizens who report their suspicious activities are all minorities. He milked the issue for at least a month.

"What do you think of [DHS’] rebranding that the terrorists aren’t Al Qaeda anymore?” he said on his Aug. 18 radio show. “It’s that veteran, it’s that gun owner, it’s that farmer … it’s that white person. Whites are the new Al Qaeda.”

Jones has also been sharply critical of same-sex marriage, tying it in a convoluted way to globalist aims and, like many religious-right organizations, pedophilia. In a June 2013 exchange with a British blogger, filmed during a protest of the Bilderberg Group that was put up on YouTube, he answered this question: "I just want to ask your views on same sex marriage. Do you think that was the idea of the gay community in their respective countries, or do you think Bilderberg has a connection to it?"

Jones responded: "Same sex marriage is sold as a civil right. And I believe that people as individuals – I'm a libertarian -- have the right to do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt others. And I'm not obsessed with the subject like people on different sides of the debate are. But clearly, from the eugenicist/globalist view, and they've written textbooks on it, you can look them up, they [globalists] want to encourage the breakdown of the family, because the family is where people owe their allegiance. That's why they want to get rid of God. Not because they're atheists, but because they want the state to be God. And so they are taking the rights of an ancient, unified program of marriage and they are breaking it. So it's a major revolution, and they're destroying the dictionary and the definition. And now they're on television in the U.S. saying, by the way, now your kids belong to the state.

"So it's just all part of that. They have a lot of camp followers that are useful idiots that really think, hey, it's my right, when they can go and have contractual, basically relationships that are the same as marriage but not called marriage. So they want to overrun that. It is an aggressive recruiting effort. It is being shoved on 5-year-old school students in the United States. Five-year-olds shouldn't be taught about heterosexual sex or homosexual sex or anything else. So it's the state promoting pedophilia, because they're a bunch of pedophiles. I mean, look at all the pedophile scandals. I mean, it's pedophile scandals in the BBC, in the government, in the churches. Not because there's a lot of pedophiles, but because it's a guild, it's a cult of pedophiles trying to take everything over. That's it. They're on the side of the devil."

Jones’ radio show and websites are chock full of ads for "recession-proof" investments in gold coins and other precious metals offered by a company called Midas Resources. Midas Resources is owned by Ted Anderson, who also owns the Genesis Communications Network, syndicator of “The Alex Jones Show.” Midas describes itself on its website as "[o]ne of the world's premiere precious metals firms, parent company of The Genesis Communications Network, proud sponsor of the Campaign For Liberty and creator of the Ron Paul Air Corps."

Jones is surely most infamous for his many predictions. The vast majority come to nothing, but he never stops reminding listeners of the one that came somewhat close. In July 2001, he predicted a major U.S. terrorist attack would occur soon and mentioned the World Trade Center and Osama Bin Laden by name. But, not surprisingly, his overall accuracy rate is infinitesimally low.

Here is a eye-popping example of that from his Feb.13, 2009, show: "They're going to have a biological event, whether they claim it was naturally occurring or whether some terrorist did it, and then only round up a few hundred thousand in a few counties somewhere, or have a beta test, have the army out, show it on the news, get everybody scared. They'll fix it, and then people will say, 'Oh my God, martial law is good, it saved us.' Then they'll have another attack that's bigger. It'll kill hundreds of thousands. Then they'll have martial law, it'll get fixed. Then they'll release the big one, and they'll kill probably half the population of the United States. Folks, I'm telling you right now, I'm sure of it. They're going to stage terror attacks. I will be very surprised if they don't stage something by the end of this year.”

Here are a few other Jones predictions that failed to materialize: At least 15 European nations will collapse in the next 16 months (prediction made on Feb. 28, 2010); staged terror attacks will occur April 15 or 19 to coincide with the release of anti-Tea Party documentaries on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and HBO (March 3, 2010); and the U.S. dollar will be devalued by 50% within two years (May 23, 2010).

Jones continues to see the specter of a globalist "New World Order" in almost every major and minor event that occurs in the United States. Following the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., in early 2016, he made numerous comments claiming that some of the occupiers were likely government or “Foundation” provocateurs. These supposed infiltrators, according to Jones, were acting on behalf of and at the direction of the Obama administration and globalist elites whose ultimate goal is the institution of Martial Law and the total end to American sovereignty.