In 1972, the soft-spoken psychedelic evangelist Terence McKenna emerged from the Colombian Amazon, where he and his brother had spent months trekking through the woods, ingesting heroic amounts of psilocybin mushrooms and pondering the secrets of the cosmos. Three years later, the McKenna brothers published Invisible Landscape, an esoteric tome that applied their shroom-gleaned jungle wisdom to the ancient Mayan calendar and the Chinese book of I Ching. “We believe that by using such ideas as a compass for the collectivity, we may find our way back to a new model in time to reverse the progressive worldwide alienation that is fast turning into an eco-cidal planetary crisis,” McKenna wrote. “The stupendous idea of an end of time is an attempt to negate the eternal stasis, to break the circle.” McKenna claimed that the end of time would come in 2012, igniting a belief in the transformative powers of that date that still burned at the fringes of American thought 37 years later, when Alex Jones donned a black western shirt and sat down in front of a video camera to set the record straight. Jones, a rougher sort of prophet than McKenna, denounced the “doomsday hubbub” in a YouTube video published December 14, 2012, one week before the supposed apocalypse. The theory didn’t originate with the Mayans, he growled as an eerie synthesizer melody descended behind him. It came from “new age thinkers” like McKenna who sought to defraud and mislead the American people. Alex Jones is a proud paranoiac, one whom might be expected to sympathize with McKenna’s message of worldwide alienation and planetary crisis. But the radio host, as he often does, sensed something even deeper afoot. He explained that a sense of futility encouraged by the 2012 theories might keep downtrodden people from standing up to their oppressors. “That is what the 2012 hoax is all about,” he said. “An artificial superstition to make people turn over control of their lives to the globalist technocrats.” To America’s greatest conspiracy theorist, even a conspiracy theory can start to look like evidence of a conspiracy. Jones is a virtuosic orator and TV personality, more engaging to watch than just about anyone else on the airwaves, regardless of whether you believe what’s coming out of his mouth. He likes to boast that he doesn’t use scripts or teleprompters on his daily radio show and video webcast, but he needn’t advertise the fact any more than Ornette Coleman should have briefed listeners that he wasn’t playing his interstellar sax explorations from sheet music. Jones has an improviser’s natural sense of rhythm: Sometimes, he is a boulder tumbling downhill, picking up speed and debris as he crescendos toward angry and invigorating catharsis; other times, he’s a feather in the wind, fluttering down, then up, letting a thought hang in the air for one suspenseful moment before plunging in a different direction entirely. He is a lifelong Texan, and his drawl sounds like it is emanating from a throat filled with dust and syrup. Today, thanks largely to the surprise success of Donald Trump’s undeniably Jonesian U.S. presidential campaign, Alex Jones is a bona fide force in mainstream American politics. His radio show is syndicated from his Austin, Texas, studio to 160 stations nationwide, and it reaches many more listeners over the internet. According to the web analytics company Quantcast, his website InfoWars reaches about 7.5 million unique readers per month, with 6.5 million of the site’s visitors based in the United States. Those numbers aren’t far behind Quantcast’s statistics for the long-running liberal publication Salon, which counts 9.1 million global and 7 million U.S. unique monthly visitors. (That probably says as much about Salon’s declining influence as it does about InfoWars’s grasp on the American psyche, but still.) In December 2015, Trump phoned in to the Alex Jones Show for a 30-minute interview. “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” the candidate told the host. Jones and InfoWars have steadfastly supported Trump’s candidacy since then. On a recent Monday, the InfoWars homepage displayed 13 different pro-Trump headlines, several of which echoed the candidate’s insistence that the election is rigged against him: “Hillary Bores Audiences While Trump Knocks It Out Of The Park,” “Trump Devastates Hillary at Catholic Event,” “Trump Surges In Polls, Hillary Moves To Steal,” “Are The Polls Rigged Against Trump? All Of These Wildly Divergent Surveys Cannot Possibly Be Correct,” and so on. T-shirts and signs bearing the slogan “Hillary for Prison”—purchased via the InfoWars store or bootlegged after Jones popularized the phrase—were an inescapable sight at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Jones himself could be seen palling around with alt-right godhead Milo Yiannopoulos and erstwhile Trump advisor Roger Stone. “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty,” Trump proclaimed at a campaign speech in West Palm Beach this month, channeling almost verbatim Jones’s obsession with the idea that the global elite are conspiring to create a one-world government. With its images of “international bankers” conniving in the shadows, the speech also carried a distinct whiff of anti-Semitism. Alex Jones is not the most important influence on Trump’s campaign. To the extent that the candidate is influenced by anything other than his own wild hairs, that designation might go to someone like Trump campaign CEO and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. But Jones’s influence on Trump is unmistakable nonetheless. It would be unthinkable for any other major-party presidential candidate to willingly appear on a show with a man who believes that the U.S. government was involved in conducting the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, as Jones does, or to intimate that he would not accept the results of the election, an impulse that Jones encourages. In 2016, Alex Jones has recruited the Republican nominee to join him in shouting out the basest fears of a nation where lunatics and police kill our countrymen in the streets, where suburban mothers fret over genetically modified baby food, where white supremacist poets post their lurid fantasias to Facebook Live, and where immigrants and refugees are pleading at our doorstep. Among the many twists in the most bizarre presidential campaign in recent history, few developments have felt more surreal than Alex Jones rising to become one of the philosopher chiefs behind a presidential candidate. It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then, word-for-word, hear Trump say it two days later. Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, believes that Trump’s initial embrace of conspiracy rhetoric was disingenuous, a ploy to reach Republicans who felt disenchanted with the GOP status quo, and that this audience eventually became his base. “But after the first debate, and after the second debate in particular, he just has the sense that he’s losing,” Fenster said. “And now the conspiracy theories are personal.” Trump’s West Palm Beach speech, which also included allegations that establishment media companies are conspiring against his campaign, came less than a week after the Washington Post published a recording of the candidate talking about sexually assaulting women. The tape, and the string of assault allegations that followed, threatened to derail Trump’s candidacy entirely. “The irony is I’m not sure that Trump especially believed in conspiracy theories to begin with,” Fenster said. “But now he’s forced to believe it, because now the conspiracy has become pitched against him. Now he has no choice but to become a fully committed conspiracy theorist.” “It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then, word-for-word, hear Trump say it two days later,” Jones once said on his radio show, in a clip that the Clinton campaign recently repurposed for an anti-Trump ad. Alex Jones has made a career from divining sinister patterns where there are none, but he is right about at least one thing: in 2016, Donald Trump sounds a lot like Alex Jones.

Credit: The Alex Jones Channel/YouTube

EXPLOSIVE: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE HARBORS TIES TO BIZARRE CONSPIRACIST Alex Jones believes that the U.S. government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He believes that Taylor Swift loves genetically modified bacteria poop. He believes that Justin Bieber will encourage Americans to hand in their guns and embrace the police state. He believes that the government adds chemicals that turn children gay to juice boxes and water bottles, as a means of population control. He believes that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, and that the Obama administration may have been involved in the crime. He believes, as Barack Obama noted in a recent Clinton campaign speech, that the president and the Democratic nominee are demons who smell like sulfur. He is not entirely closed off to the idea that Earth is controlled by a race of inter-dimensional lizard people. For Jones, all of these seemingly disconnected points are stars in a constellation, one that spells out the phrase “NEW WORLD ORDER.” His life and work are wholly governed by a fear that establishment politicians like Clinton, financiers like George Soros, and secretive organizations like the Bilderbergs are plotting the creation of an autocratic government that would reign over the entire planet. Like a religious zealot—or a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel—Jones believes that nearly any earthly phenomenon can be ascribed to a higher power: in Jones’s case, the supposed existence of the New World Order conspiracy. In an ad for an InfoWars-branded herbal supplement called Super Male Vitality, one of dozens of herbal supplements and tinctures available for purchase at the InfoWars store, images of a young and shockingly buff Jones flash across the screen as he explains the pounds he packed on after the photos were taken: “I got so focused on fighting the globalists and their program for one-world government that I stopped working out.” I got so focused on fighting the globalists and their program for one-world government that I stopped working out. Even when Trump isn’t quoting chapter-and-verse from the Alex Jones playbook, the xenophobia and distrust of globalism that powers Jones and other conspiracists is easy to identify when the candidate talks. It’s there in his hardline opposition to international trade deals, and in his repeated calls to strengthen American borders against Latin American immigrants and Syrian refugees. It’s there when Trump embraces outright conspiracy theories himself, as when he popularized the idea that Obama was born in Kenya. It’s there when he claims that vaccines cause autism, and that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese to stunt the American manufacturing industry. It was there at the final presidential debate, when he refused to confirm that he’d accept the results of the election if he were to lose. That Trump would seem to be the very image of the unscrupulous international elite that Jones so loathes—with his fabulous wealth, his luxury hotels, his decade-plus tenure as host of The Apprentice on liberal media titan NBC, his habit of screwing over the little guys that do business with the Trump Organization—apparently does little to dampen Jones’s Trump admiration or that of his supporters. Fenster likens Trump’s adjacence to conspiracy culture to that of Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and conservative ideologue who made a failed presidential run against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. (Incidentally, a young Hillary Clinton first entered political life after being galvanized by the Goldwater campaign, before taking a sharp leftward turn sometime down the road.) Like Trump, Goldwater ran an uncompromising far-right campaign that split the GOP establishment. Also like Trump, he enjoyed the support of one of his era’s preeminent fringe thinkers: Robert Welch, founder of the far-right extremist John Birch Society. The JBS, founded in 1958, advocated zealously for small government, and its McCarthyesque leadership saw communists lurking behind every corner—all the way up to the White House. Decades before Jones came on the scene, Welch was arguing to anyone who would listen that fluoridated water was a Communist plot to weaken America. “It seemed inconceivable that an anti-establishment gadfly like Goldwater could be nominated as the spokesman-head of a political party,” old-guard conservative icon William F. Buckley wrote shortly before his death in 2008. “And it was embarrassing that the only political organization in town that dared suggest this radical proposal—the GOP’s nominating Goldwater for president—was the John Birch Society.” In response to Welch’s insistence that President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and his investment in loony ideas like the fluoride plot, Buckley published a 5,000-word screed against the JBS and its founder in the National Review in 1962, effectively excommunicating Welch from mainstream conservatism. Goldwater, too, soon distanced himself from Welch, and the Birchers were ultimately relegated to the backwaters of history. Trump has yet to make any similar disavowal of Jones—in fact, by appearing on the Alex Jones Show, the candidate seemed to embrace the kookiest members of his base with open arms. In the interview, when Jones called Trump a leader in a “war for the soul of this country” against “globalists who want to have a world government,” the candidate said nothing to contradict that notion. Whether that embrace will continue past November is anyone’s guess. “What happens if Trump wins?” Fenster said. “What kind of a relationship is he going to have with Alex Jones? The over/under to me is six months, maybe even 3 months, before Alex Jones decides that Trump has actually sold him out.” But even if Trump loses in a landslide, as Goldwater did in ’64, his ideas—and those of his favorite conspiracist—aren’t going away. “It’s a frightening parallel,” said Fenster. “If you think that Goldwater ended up causing Reagan—well, what’s Trump going to cause?”

Credit: Andy Cush

Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty

SHADOWY TEXAS BROADCASTER BLASTS PROPAGANDA TO AMERICAN YOUTHS Jackson Hickey, a 22-year-old heavy metal guitarist from the Pittsburgh area, first became aware of Alex Jones as a teenager, at a party hosted by a fellow musician. “We’re going to be showing some of these films, and they’re political,” the party host announced. “If you’re not into this kind of stuff, we ask that you let the people that are into it do their thing, and not disrupt them.” The host urged Hickey to watch a film, which turned out to be one of the many documentaries that Jones has helped produce over the years. Hickey doesn’t remember the title, but he said it dealt with “Alex Jones’s stereotypical stuff: a lot of police state stuff, a lot of going into the global elite, financial crises, collapses, that kind of stuff. Government control was definitely a big target issue. This kid was basically inviting people over to his house and turning them on.” Hickey had a traditional conservative upbringing, and he was skeptical of what he heard that night. But something stuck with him, and over time, he occasionally revisited Jones’s ideas, supplementing them with his own research. “The bigger false flag stuff, could the government be behind it?” he said. “I started researching it myself, and I started seeing that historically, this has happened before. It’s not impossible for it to happen. And that turned into, with more research, it looks like it could have happened. And then, from my point of view, with more research, it’s like, OK, it definitely looks like it did happen.” Hickey now considers himself a “die-hard” Jones supporter. He reads InfoWars every day, alongside sites like Breitbart, The Drudge Report, and End the Fed. He listens to or watches the Alex Jones Show as often as he can, but he has a new commitment that has cut into his free time: volunteering with the Pennsylvania GOP, knocking on doors for Trump. That means he’s also canvassing for Pat Toomey, a sitting Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who has been decidedly lukewarm on his party’s presidential candidate. “It’s kind of funny, because I’m not even going to vote for Toomey,” Hickey said with a laugh. “But when I have that shirt on, I kind of have to support him.” When Trump gives speeches like the one in West Palm Beach, it resonates with InfoWars fans who recognize Jones’s ideas in the candidate’s rhetoric, Hickey said. He pointed to a relatively minor position as a key reason for his support of Trump. During the primary race, Trump agitated for the release of 28 pages that had been classified from the 9/11 Commission Report, speculating that they would show Saudi involvement in the World Trade Center attack. In July, the Obama administration released those pages–with redactions–and indeed, they contained potentially troubling information about Saudi government employees contacting the hijackers before 9/11. Does Alex Jones know of your activity? Trump was far from the only voice calling for the release of those pages, or even the most important voice. A bipartisan group of lawmakers penned a House resolution asking Obama to release them back in 2013, when Trump was still hosting The Celebrity Apprentice. And the legitimate concern that the Saudi government somehow assisted the 9/11 attackers is very different from the theory that the U.S. government perpetrated the attacks itself, an idea that Jones espouses on his show, which Hickey believes. Still, Hickey said, Trump’s tactic of “going on what a lot of people would call conspiracy theories, and making them into large talking points, and being very successful at it,” is appealing to Jones supporters. “I kind of have to watch what I’m saying, going door-to-door,” he said of his GOP volunteer work. He has occasionally talked to voters about what he believes are the multiple false-flags attacks that have been conducted on U.S. soil, but he only does so if the voter brings them up first. “Sometimes they’ll say, I love what [Trump] stands for, but I don’t like the fact that his mouth gets him into trouble all the time,” Hickey said. “That’s usually how it starts. And it’s like, ‘What do you agree with?’ and they start listing.” Of the dozen Jones supporters I contacted for this piece, Hickey was one of only two who expressed interest in being interviewed. Another, a young black man from Kentucky who’d published a positive review of Jones’s Super Male Vitality supplement to YouTube, was initially chatty and enthusiastic but eventually backed off. “Does Alex Jones know of your activity?” he asked at one point during our email correspondence. I told him no, he doesn’t, and that I’d recently requested an interview with Jones and had been turned down. “I spoke with a few key people in the Info Wars Camp and they said they did not know who you were,” he wrote in his next email. “It may not be in my best interest being of all the things that are going on with the inside of his camp. Any bad statements made towards any other presidential campaign runners might [result in] and very fascist consequences.”

Credit: The Alex Jones Channel/YouTube