Breaking Free From Alex Jones

Josh Owens first encountered Alex Jones in 2008 while watching Dr. Strangelove with a friend. A scene about water fluoridation prompted the friend to ask if Owens had heard of Jones. That night, Owens watched Jones's documentary Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, which he describes as "a mashup of Blair Witch and Eyes Wide Shut." It "just sort of sucked me in." Owens was a directionless teenager just out of high school, and Jones's cinematic framing of reality—using films like Network, They Live, and A Clockwork Orange not as parables but as literal exposés of the world—clicked with how Owens and his friends already communicated: through movies.

For years, Owens was a casual listener, consuming Jones's radio show while working as a janitor. The normalization was slow. "I wouldn't even say I got sucked into his world immediately," he recalls. But Jones offered something Owens had lost when he stepped away from his evangelical upbringing: purpose. "Everything is motivated by fear. There is this intense need to accomplish this thing in order to quite literally save the world. That's the narrative that he spins." When Owens won a contest to work for InfoWars, he chose it over an internship at Tyler Perry Studios because "it could serve something bigger than myself."

The Machinery of Manipulation