Alex Jones, the conspiracist at the helm of the alt-news outlet InfoWars, used an unusual defense in a custody hearing in Texas last week. His ex-wife had accused him of being unstable and dangerous, citing Mr. Jones’s rants on his daily call-in show. (Among his many unconventional stances are that the government staged the Sandy Hook massacre and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.) Through his attorneys, Mr. Jones countered that his antics are irrelevant to his fitness as a parent, because he is a performance artist whose public behavior is part of his fictional character. In other words, when he tells his audience that Hillary Clinton is running a sex-trafficking operation out of a Washington pizza parlor (an accusation for which he has offered a rare retraction), he is doing so merely for entertainment value.

Many of his liberal critics have since asked whether Mr. Jones’s devoted fans will abandon him now that he has essentially admitted to being a fraud.

They will not.

Alex Jones’s audience adores him because of his artifice, not in spite of it. They admire a man who can identify their most primal feelings, validate them, and choreograph their release. To understand this, and to understand the political success of other figures like Donald Trump, it is helpful to know a term from the world of professional wrestling: “kayfabe.”

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.