Alex Jones — conspiracy peddler, provocateur, Texan — lost easy access to millions upon millions of followers this week when Facebook, YouTube, Apple and Spotify banned much, if not all, of his content.

Thinking of Jones’ empire — built on provably false theories and predictably wrong predictions — I wondered about those followers.

Who are they? What brings them to his pages? Why do they seem willing to accept fantasy and conjecture over fact? Do they, as Jones’ lawyers have suggested, think the whole thing is a bit for entertainment? Would they tell me — a longtime member of the mainstream media? Would they just scream at me?

Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, before his show in Austin, Feb. 17, 2017. Over the past several days Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have removed most of Alex Jones' programming from their services. (ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN / New York Times)

I went into this with the reality-based conclusion that the conspiracies Jones promotes don’t hold up to the most basic scrutiny. Among them:

The 9/11 attack was an inside job by the U.S. government as a pretext for going to war.

The Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

The true cause of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death was covered up.

The government uses "weather weapons," including tornadoes, to murder people.

"Pizzagate is real," Jones announced on one of his videos, referring to the claim that liberal Democratic politicians were molesting children in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant. (In March, 2017, Jones apologized for helping promote the hoax.)

I knew in calling Jones’ followers, I would have my work cut out for me. To start with, Jones has coached them on how to respond. Next to liberals, the media is his main target.

“They tried to break all the Republicans, persecute people,” Jones said in a broadcast this week. “Trump broke through their bullying and lies. We stood beside him, and now they want to take out the press from under him, and they want to use me as the distorted poster child to do it.”

As for his fans, Jones had this to say: “They think you’re weak.”

With that I sent a dozen or so private messages to Jones supporters on Facebook and Twitter. Most didn't respond at all. I did hear back from several who were willing, even eager, to talk.

They didn’t hand me my head on a platter. They were easy to talk to if...distrustful. They almost all say they don't swallow everything Jones says, but they think he's onto something - whether it's the "truth" about 9-11 or the government and guns.

The whole effort to slow his internet reach is, they agree, a conspiracy. Several pointed to the fact that the social media sites acted against Jones at the same time. (Twitter is the only major social media operation that hasn't acted to curtail Jones' reach.)

One of those willing to talk was Christy Boguszewicz.

"We're being censored all over," said Boguszewicz, of Odessa. "I know many of my friends who share conservative posts exposing the left are constantly getting thrown in Facebook jail," she said, referring to when Facebook locks users out of their account, typically for 24 hours, for violating its terms.

Just that morning, Facebook had suspended her ability to share posts she considers important. The specific post she wanted to share " was about socialists in our country who call out people as Nazis," she said. "But they don't realize that the Nazis were actually called the National Socialists."

Boguszewicz doesn’t remember if what she tried to share on her Facebook page was an Infowars post — it might have been, she said. It was the first time she’s had problems with Facebook.

Boguszewicz manages restaurants for a living. She was polite. She offered that though she's a fan of Jones, she disagrees with him on some issues.

One of the things she's not so sure about is Jones' views on a 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

Families who lost children in the mass shooting filed a defamation suit against Jones, who's promoted theories that the school shooting was a "false flag" operation by gun control advocates. His lawyers argued recently in court that Jones did not defame one victim's parents, who said they have been so harassed by Jones' followers they've been forced to move seven times.

"But I just know there have been a lot of events by our government and the left, specifically, to cause gun control to be further pushed," Boguszewicz said. She mentioned the Oct. 1, 2017, Las Vegas mass shooting as suspicious.

That's why Infowars needs to be on Facebook, she argued. "We need to be able to share this information with everyone," she said. "That's not to say I completely agree with everything that he says. But I do agree with most. And I definitely agree that Infowars should be out there on Facebook."

"They shouldn't take it away from us. That's our constitutional right," Boguszewicz said.

Plenty of people share her point of view, but the Constitution does not guarantee freedom of speech on websites like Facebook. As privately owned companies, Facebook, Apple and the like can decide what content is permitted on their platforms.

One longtime follower of Jones takes him with a grain of salt even as he's listened to him for over 20 years.

"Does Alex believe everything he says? Probably not," said Harlan Dietrich, 38, owner of Brave New Books, an independent bookstore in Austin, where Jones is based. "In radio or cable news, there's always an element of performance artistry," Dietrich said.

"But being unafraid to question things out loud and propose different thought experiments has a long history in this country," Dietrich said.

Dietrich said he started listening to Jones around the time the Infowars founder got his start on Austin Public Access Television in the late 1990s. "He hasn't changed dramatically and is still the firebrand who will shout at his audience to try and motivate them to pay attention," Dietrich said.

What Jones is doing is questioning conventional wisdom, he said. His theories and questions "may just be opinions, but if you listen closely and do your own research you will often be led to a staggering amount of facts," he said.

Dietrich did not say if those facts debunk Jones' theories.

Banning Jones from major social media sites is "dangerous to democracy," Dietrich said.

"I don't believe everything and there are certainly some conspiracies that are beyond the pale. But unlike most people I believe in the democracy of information and how the best information will tend to stand on its own," he said.

Marine veteran Joe Hyatt, who took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, put it more simply: "I didn't go to war and fight for censorship. I didn't do that brother. And that's what breaks my heart," said Hyatt, 42, who works for an equipment rental store n Garland.

"I have a lot of beliefs that are conservative. Now, they can say that I'm crazy and kick me off."

"Makes you think"

Hyatt, 42, of Garland, admits some of Jones' stuff is "pretty far out there" but still considers him thought-provoking.

"He's got some things that make you think," Hyatt said. "I would stop listening if I thought there was something that didn’t have any truth or sense to it."

Hyatt agrees with Jones that the government wants gun owners to surrender their legally purchased guns. ”You’re definitely looking at the possibility of a government-run gun grab,” Hyatt said. And the post-9/11 combat veteran is even open to Jones’ views that the government might have been behind the 9/11 attacks.

Alex Jones, of Infowars, and Roger Stone, former Donald Trump advisor, debate with Jonathan Alter during an episode of Alter Family Politics on SiriusXM at Quicken Loans Arena on July 20, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Ben Jackson / Getty Images for SiriusXM)

"I've got to be honest with you, there are some things I look at and one and one don't equal two," Hyatt said. "Why was some of the coverage of certain things from that day erased?"

Hyatt said he heard about broadcast reports on 9/11 of small aircraft hitting the Pentagon. And that there should have been a bigger debris field from the impact of a jumbo airliner on the Pentagon. "Where are those reports? I just don't think we're getting the whole truth," Hyatt said.

Hyatt understands there's no guarantee you can say whatever you want on a platform like Facebook. "Facebook, Twitter, they're privately owned companies. There's certain understandings," Hyatt said. "The concern is that they advertise as a free and open forum. Yet if you tend to write some things, especially from a socially conservative viewpoint, they're red-flagged," he said.

"There's something seriously wrong with that."

Asked to explain, Hyatt said, "We're expected to tolerate people who live a lifestyle that's contrary to my beliefs. And yet someone comes along with a different viewpoint from these people, and they're like, 'Oh, you're kicked off. You're done. Oh, and you're going to court for defamation.' "

Bradley Brewer, 30, works in the financial and banking industry and said he's been listening to Infowars since he was in college in 2008. Brewer lives in eastern Indiana and said he follows a wide array of news. The way he sees it, Jones simply pushes his own theories based on news events.

"He'll say, 'This looks weird. We don't have answers to that,'" Brewer said. "It's pretty obvious when he's talking news and when he gives his opinions. I don't have a problem with that."

Asked if he shared Jones' views on 9/11, Brewer said he agrees with Jones that there are still questions about the attack. "We just don't know truly what happened. I don't think the truth we've gotten is necessarily the entire truth."

Even when Jones argues that 9/11 was an "inside job" by the U.S. government, "he prefaces that by saying 'We don't know what really happened,'" Brewer said.

Jones has been right about the "surveillance state," Brewer said, pointing to the surveillance operation by the National Security Agency of phone calls, emails and other communications by Americans since 9/11. "He was speaking about that for some time. I think he got that right," Brewer said.

He also agrees with Jones that government officials use gun massacres to push for gun control. "Immediately following the tragic events at Sandy Hook, it was used for political purposes by the Obama administration and the Democrats at that time."

"Obviously, I don't think he gets everything right," Brewer said.

Grant Stinchfield, an anchor on NRA TV, said there's not a lot of common ground between him and Jones. "There are some things on which I agree with Alex Jones and some things I wildly disagree with him on," he said.

But Stinchfield noted that Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam group in the United States, has promoted anti-Semitic views on Facebook, and he's still on the platform. That's true.

"They tell us they are fair, but in the end they are not fair to one side and that's the conservative side."

Ban is a test

The last word came from the United Kingdom. I exchanged messages on Twitter with a man who said his name was David Kazama, 30 years old and a shop worker who has been following Jones for six years.

Kelly Jones, ex-wife of Infowars host Alex Jones, carries a sign as she arrives at the Travis County Courthouse, Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018, in Austin. Alex Jones wants a Texas judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by families of some of the children killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. (Eric Gay / AP)

Kazama believes the action taken against Jones is a test to see if banning people from Facebook works as a strategy to muzzle conservative views. "What happened to 'don't like it don't watch it,"' he said. "Where do you draw the line between hate speech and real speech?"

I mentioned to Kazama how Jones' own lawyers have argued in a lawsuit brought by parents of the victims in the Sandy Hook shooting that "no reasonable reader or listener" would expect that Jones would speak factually on his show and that "such statements are mere opinions masquerading as fact."

And during a custody battle last year between Jones and his former wife, Jones' attorney, Randall Wilhite, said that his client is not the same person off the air as he is on it. Wilhite drew a comparison to judging Jack Nicholson based on his role as the Joker in Batman.

"He's playing a character," he said.

Given what his lawyers said, why would he take anything that Alex Jones said seriously, I asked Kazama.

His response: "Alex released a video in response to all this last week with his lawyer - now I can't view it to say what exactly was said lol because it's been removed."

"SMH," I reply.