A few hours into Monday’s big “America First” rally for Donald Trump in Cleveland, the Alex Jones entourage arrived in an old beige tour bus. Jones’s security detail, expanded for the convention, emerged from the bus first, scanning for threats to their stocky Texan boss, who’d just scored the week’s first viral media hit with a recorded waylay of Karl Rove at the Dallas airport. The Rove clip was a classic Jones ambush, the kind he’s been staging and sharing since the days of VHS tapes and padded-envelopes.



Most of the Jones fans packed into the rally were in diapers during Jones’s long, lonely pre-Internet career. It’s the YouTube-era celebrity Jones they know and love; not a few drove hundreds of miles to hear him speak, and only incidentally to cheer for Trump. The king of conspiracy—equal parts comic performance artist and right-populist provocateur—did not disappoint. Bounding onstage in sunglasses and a dark blazer, he greeted the crowd with thunderbolts from throat muscles forged over years of screaming into bullhorns until his spittle turned red. (The result is a vocal instrument unique to the annals of broadcasting, as if the recombinant seed of Sam Kenison and Lemmy had fertilized and given power of speech to a junkyard cement truck.) Set to burst-fire mode, Jones began to rant and preach, a hybrid oratory for which The Alex Jones Show, the massively popular radio program that anchors Infowars, his swelling media empire, serves as a running master class.

“These people are not liberals,” he yelled, referencing the officials who’d rescinded his permit to fly a “Hillary for Prison” banner over Cleveland throughout the convention. Rather:

They are anti-freedom SCUM who need to get their ASS to North KOREA! We’re identifying the globalists, their program of control, their operations. Once the public understands the paradigm: IT’S! GAME! OVER! Globalism and the New World Order are in trouble. Foreign, multinational, anti-free market corporations funding gun control and open borders—these are the people conquering us. YOU are the resistance! The American IDEA is the answer to the globalist program of enslavement and worldwide tyranny. The answer to 1984 is SE-VEN-TEEN SE-VEN-TY SIX!

All of this is greatest-hits familiar to anyone who knows Jones from 1996 or 2006. Like the morning’s guerilla-video attack on Karl Rove, the language and delivery was so familiar you could forget this was the Twilight Zone Cleveland of 2016. Birds chirp, the mailman walks his route, Cleveland’s city fathers hang welcome signs touting the location of the world’s first electric traffic signal. But then, without adjusting your picture, Karl Rove arrives a scorned and neutered dissident from a gone world, while Alex Jones, the father of 9/11 Truth and the punk jester-theorist of a New World Order master conspiracy involving DMT clockwork elves, receives a hero’s welcome at the kick-off rally for the Republican nominee. A nominee that, Jones believes, is one of his own.

“There’s no way the Trump people would have reached out to me a year and a half ago, if he wasn’t aware of the work,” Jones would tell me later in the week. “He’s been what you call a ‘closet conspiracy theorist’ for 50 years. I think he’s been a chameleon in the system, and now he sees the time to strike.”