Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here?
In the spring of 2017, I was in Austin, Texas, reporting a long profile on Alex Jones and Infowars, and a number of my sources told me about a video editor who’d grown deeply disillusioned working for Jones and quit. I was told that he had all kinds of horror stories about working in Jones’s media empire. I prodded my sources to reveal his identity but was told that he wasn’t ready to talk. It wasn’t until two years later, when I was back in Austin, that Josh Owens DM’d me out of the blue and asked to speak.
We met at a café on South Congress, and he told me story after wild story—about being an angry young person and listening to Jones, winning an Infowars video contest that eventually led to a job working for the company, Jones’s erratic and egregious personal behavior, and the pressure to spin lies and make up news stories to please Jones. He told me that he was trying to make sense of what had happened to him and attempting to help others see Infowars and Jones for what it all was: a dangerous, morally bankrupt conspiracy-media company run by a reckless narcissist.
Owens wanted to tell his story himself and did so in 2019 in a long New York Times Magazine essay titled “I Worked for Alex Jones. I Regret It.” We’ve continued to speak intermittently since, often when Jones is in the news. Owens isn’t doing many interviews, but he agreed to speak with me about the experience of watching his former boss on trial, what it was like to work with Jones as he concocted lies in real time, and what, if anything, might be done to hold the nation’s second-most prominent conspiracy theorist to account.
Warzel: You’ve described working for Jones as this extremely volatile experience where, in the office, he’s in complete control all the time. Has it been surreal to watch Jones in a courtroom these past few weeks? What have you made of watching this trial?
It’s mixed emotions, I guess. First off, I’m happy the jury seemed to see through Jones’s typical tactics of manipulation. There were some aw-shucks moments Jones tried to create where he’d talk about not having any money and being unfairly persecuted. And I worried the jury might be swayed by his
