Josh Owens spent four years documenting the paranoid visions of Alex Jones, chasing radiation scares in post-Fukushima California, embedding with Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, and fabricating terror footage. By 2017, he was done. In a new memoir, "The Madness of Believing," Owens has become the latest insider to walk away from the conspiracy machine and look back with something between nostalgia and horror.
"It was constant chaos," Owens told the Guardian of his time as a video editor and field producer at Infowars between 2013 and 2017. "I didn't enjoy the anxiety-inducing trips, regardless of whether there was anything to find or not. It was just gut-wrenching."
The work was exhilarating and damaging in equal measure. Owens acknowledges the rush of being part of something transgressive, yet he cannot shake awareness of the harm inflicted by the rhetoric he helped amplify. "I might be able to say it was a little more fun if people weren't harmed by the rhetoric," he said.
The most visceral harm came from Jones's repeated insistence that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was staged to push gun control. Twenty children and six educators died in that attack. Jones now faces a $1.5 billion defamation judgment. A bankruptcy court ordered the sale of Infowars, which briefly changed hands to the Onion in 2024 before the deal collapsed. Infowars remains in legal limbo, and Jones keeps broadcasting.
Owens portrays his former boss as a contradiction: a man who displayed flashes of self-awareness, once handing an employee his Rolex and asking, "Am I that terrible of a person?" yet remained fundamentally indifferent to collateral damage. Jones was "a pure expression of self-centered freedom," Owens writes, "a defiant assertion of his own whims, seemingly unconcerned with how his actions affected others."
What made Jones dangerous was not mere bombast but his systematic approach to conspiracy thinking. Owens observes that Jones framed every tragedy as a false flag operation. The relentless repetition did not prompt analysis. It bred paranoia. The method replaced critical thinking with reflexive suspicion.
At his 2016 peak, during Trump's first campaign, Jones claimed 5 million daily listeners and more than 80 million monthly video streams. Trump himself appeared on the show and praised Jones's reputation. Drawing from the shock-jock playbook of Howard Stern and Don Imus, Jones had weaponized digital media and social platforms to reach an audience no radio predecessor could touch.
"None of those people had the cultural capital Jones has," Owens said. "I don't think anyone else has since in his space."
The landscape has shifted. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others now occupy similar terrain. Jones has responded by escalating. "He's got more overt, more extreme and more hateful," Owens said. "But the seeds were always there."
Competition appears to have pushed Jones toward greater depravity, though Owens suspects the algorithm may be as much driver as audience. Jones monitors caller feedback obsessively. He did not mention Pizzagate, the baseless claim that Democrats trafficking in child victims, until online communities accused him of suppressing it. "In a lot of ways he's following the culture, or at least the culture he sees as viable," Owens explained.
Yet Jones calculates his moves carefully. He avoids targeting private citizens who cannot defend themselves. His on-air persona of raw emotion masks deliberate strategy. "Jones acts like he's off the cuff and speaking from an emotional place but he knows what he's doing," Owens said.
The Sandy Hook judgment delivered unprecedented consequences. Deplatforming from mainstream social media in 2021 seemed to spell the end. It did not. Owens points out that Jones maintains backup infrastructure: another studio, independent servers, corporate entities shielded from court orders. "Even if he loses Infowars he has a back-up studio, server and company that he says cannot be touched by the courts," Owens said. "He may not be unscathed but he hasn't gone."
Owens has framed his memoir as a redemption story. He entered Infowars as a believer and emerged deradicalized through the influence of people outside the bubble. "Maybe my story can provide some sense of hope that some people can turn around," he said. "I was a firm believer in a lot of the things and contributed to it in my own way. But I was deradicalized with the help of other people."
The book joins a small shelf of insider accounts: Melania and Me by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff and others penned by people who circled the core of MAGA power and lived to regret it. Each represents a form of psychological escape, a return to selfhood after immersion in somebody else's delusion.
Author James Rodriguez: "Owens has documented a crucial truth: conspiracy factories survive legal defeat and deplatforming because their operators are too resourceful and their audiences too devoted to kill the machine with a single blow."
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