Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. “Your New World Order will fall!” he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. “Humanity will defeat you!”



A syndicated radio host, filmmaker, and all-around countercultural icon based in Austin, Texas, Jones has long been one of the country’s most significant purveyors of paranoia. His 2007 documentary Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, in which the megaphone scene takes place, purports to reveal a eugenics-obsessed global elite bent on eliminating most of the earth’s population and enslaving the rest. Members of a Satanic international network, Jones explains in an ominous voiceover, have been “steering planetary affairs for hundreds of years. Now, in the final stage, they prepare for open world government.” And, in a line that would later echo among tea party protesters nationwide, he says, “The answer to 1984 is 1776!”

Though Jones has always had impassioned fans, until recently, he has remained a quintessentially marginal figure. A leader of the 9/11 Truth movement--he’s listed as an executive producer on the final cut of Loose Change, a documentary at the movement’s center--Jones claims to have uncovered the interconnected plots behind the JFK assassination, water fluoridation, and the recent economic crisis. He has accused the Illuminati of putting its symbols in the Starbucks logo as a taunting show of strength. Ron Paul is a frequent guest on his radio show, and Jones, who also runs a website called RonPaulWarRoom.com, has been a major supporter of the Ron Paul movement. One of his highest-profile guests was Lou Dobbs--Jones calls him one of his “idols”--who appeared on the show in March 2008; the two discussed ostensible plans to merge the United States into a supranational “North American Union” with Mexico and Canada.

But it’s really only since Barack Obama’s election, when Jones turned the full force of his apocalyptic imagination toward the new president, that his ideas have found purchase in the conservative mainstream. Several Republican officeholders, from state representatives to congressmen, have appeared on his program to trade wild theories about Obama. Glenn Beck has brought his fear-mongering about the New World Order to network television, and an online Fox News show collaborated with him on a joint broadcast.

To be sure, sundry leftists, as well as some Hollywood types, appear on Jones’s show, as well. Dennis Kucinich and Noam Chomsky have both been on. It’s where actor Charlie Sheen goes to spout his 9/11 Truth theories. But left-wing craziness tends to stay sequestered on the fringes of politics, while the right-wing fringe increasingly is the Republican mainstream. According to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, only 37 percent of Republicans believe that Obama was born in the United States. Jones has become politically salient because much of the right is as unhinged as he is.