Alex Jones Didn’t Just Spread Lies: He Helped the Right Wing Weaponize Them to Undermine American Democracy

How Republicans turned misinformation into a system for seizing power and reshaping reality, and the damage those lies are doing to our democracy…

I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.

It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).

But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the rightwing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:

“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism. It’s not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently.”

The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the the nation.

When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.

This is why partisan lies used to seize and hold power are so corrosive: they destroy a nation’s sense of shared reality.

While it’s nearly impossible to identify any meaningful lies Democrats depend on to win elections, increase media profits, or pass special-interest legislation, there’s a long list of rightwing lies that serve those exact purposes:

— Tax cuts for billionaires help average people,
— Unions are bad for workers,
— Climate change is a hoax,
— Welfare fraud is widespread and mostly committed by Black “welfare queens,”
— Social Security is going broke and lifting the cap on what billionaires pay won’t solve the problem,
— The 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
— Immigrants bring more crime than native-born citizens,
— Deregulation doesn’t produce harms but by increasing profits helps society,
— National single-payer health insurance can’t work in America (even though it mysteriously works just fine, better than what we have, in dozens of other democracies),
— America was founded as a Christian nation,
— Men are superior to women,
— White people are superior to people of color,
— Vaccines are dangerous and Covid isn’t,
— Voter fraud and voting by non-citizens is widespread,
— Guns will keep your home and children safe,
— Rich Jews are funding a program to “replace” white workers with dark-skinned people,
— Increasing the minimum wage destroys economies and causes severe inflation.

Each one of these lies is repeated regularly by Republicans on TV and hosts of rightwing talk shows as if they’re true to the point where MAGA voters can recite them in their sleep (and when they’re carrying tiki torches).

As America learned when Fox “News” was forced to admit in court that their top talent was lying directly to the camera for months about the 2020 election, these lies are typically planned, organized, intentional, and can produce millions in revenue for the media and its stars.

Not to mention supporting billions in profits for aligned industries like fossil fuels and tobacco that depend on people believing lies to keep consuming their products.

Republican lies can also swing elections, like when a PAC aligned with George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign promoted their Willie Horton ad arguing that a prison furlough program that led to a white woman being raped and murdered by a Black man was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’ fault when, in fact, it’d been started by a previous Republican governor.

Rightwing lies have taken America into or prolonged wars, as we learned when Nixon lied about his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, Reagan “rescued” medical students by invading Grenada, George HW Bush had a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lie on national TV about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, Bush and Cheney lied us into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Trump lied us into attacking Iran and killing hundreds of innocent children.

Republican lies can even create self-fulfilling prophecies, like how when both Obama and Biden each came into office Republicans and rightwing media immediately started loudly claiming the US southern border was “now wide open” and that lie, repeated over and over again by conservative politicians and media, made its way down to South and Central America and caused people there to believe it and then to migrate north.

It’s particularly problematic when Republican lies become loyalty tests for public office. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse have been asking every Republican-promoted federal judge nominee to come before the Judiciary Committee the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Not even one single candidate has yet answered with the simple truth that Joe Biden won, fair and square, a result that was even litigated 60 times and proven before the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The problem Republicans, rightwing billionaires, and conservative media have is that if they simply told the truth about any of the things in the list above — that they really do support more pollution and raw bigotry while exclusively working to enrich the already morbidly rich — they’d quickly lose their audiences and their voters.

The fix, therefore, isn’t particularly complicated, even if does require discipline.

Every anchor, every host, every journalist, and particularly every guest on radio or TV who lets one of these lies slide past without correction needs to be called out for it.

Not “some people disagree,” or “Democrats say otherwise.” Lies like these require a flat-out, factual, on-air correction: “That’s not true, and here’s the proof.” There really are differences between the two major parties, and only the GOP consistently uses demonstrable lies to get their way.

When hosts or Republican guests refuse to respond to that in good faith, when they treat a documented lie as just another “perspective” worthy of equal consideration, they have to be outed.

The Founders understood — as much as they loved free speech — that democracy can’t survive without a press willing to tell the truth. What we have today in far too much of our media landscape is the opposite: a press that’s either owned by billionaires invested in the lies or so terrified of being called “liberal” that it’s stopped holding liars accountable.

So, when you see this happen, pick up your phone and tell the network, station, host, or politician exactly what you just witnessed. And amplify it on social media.

The deep truth here is that decades of Republican lies have only worked because so many in the media — and so many of us who consume media — have let them pass unchallenged.

The facts are on our side. Americans, when presented with the actual substance of these issues without partisan labels attached, consistently support the positions Democrats hold and Republicans lie about.

And remember, every one of the lies on the list above exists for one reason only: because without them, the people telling them couldn’t win an election, hold an audience, get tax cuts and deregulation, or make more money.

So, correct the lies at the dinner table. Share articles like this one that document them with receipts. Support the journalists and outlets brave enough to call partisan and corporate liars out by name. Show up for protests. And, most important, vote this fall like your democracy depends on it, because (as the old cliché goes) it does.

Louise’s Daily Song: “When Truth Breaks”

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.