The website Infowars has gained a massive following — it is currently viewed just under a million times a day on average, over thirty million times a month, and its content reaches millions more through Youtube.

Popularized by host Alex Jones’ unhinged rants, the site’s viewership grew steadily throughout the course of the 2016 election, peaking around December when then-candidate Trump appeared on his show.

At the time Trump told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down” and reassured him, “I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

One of Infowars’ most popular conspiracies is that 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting were just a few examples of a long list of false-flag operations the U.S. government has carried out.

Infowars has also, at various times, promoted the following conspiracies:

Pizzagate

Glenn Beck, Anderson Cooper, and Beyonce are CIA agents

Hillary Clinton smells like an ‘actual demon’

Feminism is designed to end humanity

Obama and NATO were using ISIS to geopolitically isolate Russia

Obama brought Ebola to the U.S.

Also, Obama is a Muslim and his birth certificate was forged

Michelle Obama is transgender

Global warming is a hoax

The list goes on, with Jones having articulated a comprehensive, do-it-yourself version of reality through his countless hours of profanity-laden, vein-bulging tirades.

It’s important to understand that incoherent as Jones’ rants may appear to consumers of mainstream media, in their viewers’ minds Infowars shines a lone ray of light into a twisted, dark, corrupt world.

Infowars ethos comes from its ability to build a speculative conspiracy off a foundation of truth, making the impossible seem plausible.

For example, our government has flirted with conducting false-flag operations as recently as 1962, when a proposal by the joint chiefs of staff to commit terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens to justify an invasion of Cuba was rejected by the Kennedy administration.

So it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility to suggest that the U.S. would conduct a false-flag operation against its own people at the will of the military-industrial complex.

What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the intelligence community wouldn’t simply manufacture more convincing evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq following the false-flag.

By Jones’ logic, an agency that built remote-control commercial airliners in secret and staged the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor couldn’t come up with ‘evidence’ of WMDs after the fact to justify the invasion.

Similarly, if the government really wanted to take away everyone’s guns for some sinister purpose, it stands to reason that they’d have an incentive to shift public opinion in favor of stricter gun control laws.

And what better way could there be to influence public opinion than by showing the public just what guns can do — take the lives of innocent children?

Therefore, people who were already inclined to fear for their ability to own guns follow along as Jones plays into their pre-conceived notions. The problem with this conspiracy, however, is twofold.

First, if the U.S. government was actually going to engage in a false flag, they would simply kill people for real. They would not use ‘crisis actors’ as Jones claims.

Operation Northwoods, the false-flag plan that Kennedy rejected, didn’t call for the use of actors to fake deaths — it called for real deaths. Even in light of the inhumanity of the U.S. military-industrial complex, it is still utterly absurd to claim that they would hire actors to stage the deaths of twenty children.

Additionally, the sinister forces that supposedly staged Sandy Hook didn’t even get what they wanted.

Congress didn’t pass a single-piece of gun-control legislation in the wake of the shooting, highlighting the nonsensical nature of Jones’ opportunistic use of tragedy to promote his conspiracies.

For his part, the father of one of the victims at Sandy Hook said he wished he could be in court at Jones’ divorce hearing, where the Infowars host’s legal counsel attempted to claim that he is merely a ‘performance artist’ in a desperate bid to save Jones custody of his kids.

Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah was shot and killed at Sandy Hook, said this of Jones, “I wish I could be there in the courtroom to stare him down to remind him of how he’s throwing salt on a wound, and so he can remember how he handed out salt for other people to throw on mine.”

Ultimately, Infowars uses ‘alternative facts’ to prey on people’s desire to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world.

Macabre as some of the site’s theories may be, they provide a sense of comfort in the order they assume undergirds the events that shape our increasingly chaotic news cycle.

Simply put, it’s easier to delegate the job of interpreting the chaos of the world to someone who will provide you with concrete, actionable conclusions than to accept the inherent uncertainty of our global world order.

For some people, it’s easier to believe that the government planted actors and nobody really died (the same thing we all remind ourselves during particularly upsetting scenes in movies or television) than to accept that a mentally-ill person killed twenty-seven people in an elementary school.

It’s easier to believe that the government intentionally killed almost 3,000 people in a false flag than to accept that while we may have had a role in funding the terrorists who later attacked us, our government is nowhere near that omnipotent.

Thus, in today’s hyper-partisan, postmodern political landscape, Jones appears to have carved out a sizable niche of people who trust him to make sense of the world.

Infowars Washington Bureau Chief tweets a photo of himself in the White House press briefing room.

On Monday, May 22nd, Infowars announced, “In an epic blow to the mainstream media’s control of the narrative, Infowars has officially received White House Press Credentials that will allow Washington Bureau Chief Jerome Corsi to attend White House press briefings.”

However, other reporters have said that Corsi’s press pass was temporary — valid only for one day.

The White House has yet to comment, although in January White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of Jones, “He is not credentialed for the White House. The White House Press Office has not offered him credentials.”

The Infowars post from Monday floated the idea that “Alex Jones may even attend some White House press briefings in person.”

The next day, Jones spoke about the Manchester bombing in a video posted to Youtube.

He said, in part, “a big bomb goes off at a pop star’s rock concert bombing a bunch of liberal trendies, the same people god love them, on average who are promoting open borders.”

Jones’ tone in the video is characteristic of his style, unforgiving in light of tragedy and uncompromising in his willingness to use literally anything as an excuse to further his worldview.

It’s not hard to see why President Trump, who tweeted, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” following the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people, was so effusive in his praise of Jones.

As far as Infowars future as a member of the White House Press Corps goes, we’ll have to wait and see. But one thing is for sure, credentials or no credentials, nothing will stop Alex Jones.