As the satirical online newspaper the Onion waits for court approval to take over the conspiracy website Infowars, Helen Pidd speaks to a former staff member about its sinister rise and dramatic fall
As the satirical online newspaper the Onion waits for court approval to take over the conspiracy website Infowars,Alex Jones is known as the US far-right conspiracist who has been peddling misinformation and dangerous lies on his site, Infowars.
For years in his early 20s, Josh Owens worked for him, accepting his point of view.
“Jones made the world seem exciting,” Owens tells Helen Pidd. In 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut and killed 20 children and six adults. It prompted probably the most serious conversation the US had ever had about gun control. But Jones used it as fodder on his site.
The children were alive, he said, the grieving parents were actors. The whole thing was a government plot to take away people’s guns. Owens tells Pidd what it was like to work on the website – and how he came to realise how wrong he had been. In 2018, Jones was sued for defamation by the families.
He was eventually ordered to pay a record $1.4bn in damages and filed for bankruptcy. Last Friday, after nearly 30 years of spreading lies, Infowars recorded its final broadcast. Now the site is on the verge of being taken over by the satirical newspaper the Onion. But is this really the end of Alex Jones?
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